Allergic to Gratitude
by BC
Summary: In the wake of the Uncivil Skirmish, Tony Stark is the only Avenger left. To his unending surprise, things just get… easier. (Betty helps.)
1. Indecipherable Interpersonal Rituals

Allergic to Gratitude

x

Summary: In the wake of the Uncivil Skirmish, Tony Stark is the only Avenger left. To his unending surprise, things just get… easier.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Avengers or anything else Marvel-related, and I am not paid for writing fanfiction.

Warnings: mentions of violence, betrayal, a bit of angst, unreliable narrator, implied promiscuity, polyamory, het and slash, sexual situations, unapologetic fairy tale ending for Tony, playing fast and loose with canon, ignores AoS beyond the basic premise, some OOC, very bad language, the lowest kinds of humor

A/N: I vomited out this entire story almost in one go and, frankly, have no clue where it came from. Bits are probably inspired by LokasennaHiddleston's stories – very relaxing reading, go read if you like Tony finding true love and winning over everyone and going neener-neener. I do like winner Tony (if it wasn't obvious) but I can't really write him like that, so this is something a little bit different.

Obviously, since it's Tony's POV, the story is biased in Team Iron Man's favor. But, as I keep mentioning, I don't do character bashing. At some point Tony will unwind enough to even try and understand where the other guys were coming from – though he's not going to forgive and forget.

x

Chapter One: Indecipherable Interpersonal Rituals

x

"Hi, this is Stephanie," chirps a girl's voice. "I can't pick up right now, so leave me a message and I'll get back to you-"

"Ross' goons are sniffing after the Bartons," Tony says, out of patience with this fucking farce. If Coulson doesn't pick up for this he won't pick up at all, and in that case he's welcome to go fuck himself.

There's a click down the line. "Is this supposed to be a threat or a warning?"

Tony feels his hackles rise. If he wanted to threaten or warn, he would have gone fucking _competently_ about it.

"This is just great for you, isn't it? You saddle me with your bunch of backstabbing traitors, _unite_ us through dying for the idea of our team, then go off on your adventures, and whatever you or your ducklings fuck up – let's just blame it on Stark. Why not? He's always been the easiest scapegoat." Tony huffs. "Yeah, if anything happens to the Bartons, that will be on my head, too, I'm pretty sure. Never mind that Barton just left them behind to follow your precious Refrigerated Mess on the career of an international criminal. One of these days I'll learn not to fucking trust spies."

He moves his thumb to end the call.

"Wait-"

It's probably exhaustion that makes him pause.

"-Stark. I've honestly no idea what is happening on that front, but whatever it is, I don't believe Laura's got anything to do with it."

There's an accusation in there that makes Tony want to infect all Coulson's tech with some sort of headache-inducing virus.

After using him for years and sucking him nearly dry, this is what they think of him. Howard was right. You can't play nice or they'll treat you like you're weak. And, eventually, you will become weak.

He should have remembered he didn't have a heart.

"Obviously, I'm the kind of person who'd go after a woman and her kids, never mind that she has selflessly helped me in the past. Sure. Just because I think her husband is a self-centered, stupid, selfish dick, I'd take it out on her."

Coulson starts saying something, but Tony's out of the last scraps of patience by now.

"So I'm going to find her, and I'll probably kidnap her and make her watch as somebody hurts the kids, and when Barton comes crying to you about how I went after his family and deliberately destroyed them, you will pat him on the head, hunt me down and tase me until I'm a twitching mess. This sounds familiar, doesn't it."

"That's not-"

"You told me that's how it would go. I should have listened. Fuck you and the Bus you rode in on."

"Stark-"

He hangs up.

x

Relocating Laura and the kids turns out to be easier than Tony expected, because… actually, because she's pissed. This sounds counterintuitive, but somehow Laura Barton's the only person on this entire planet that is not pissed _at Tony_.

He doesn't understand it. But it's kind of nice.

"Oh, good," she says from the porch as he approaches the house.

He comes alone because he doesn't want to freak her out, but it seems that she's made out of tougher stuff. There's still the chance that the 'good' refers to her opportunity to punch him in the face, but-

"Here, hold him." She puts Nathaniel into Tony's arms, and he fumbles him for a moment before his hands reconfigure themselves on autopilot. He doesn't have a whole lot of feelings about toddlers – aside from thinking they shouldn't be anywhere near him in the interest of their safety, but that seems to apply to anyone and everyone regardless of age – but it's not the first time he's held a child, and it's not rocket science.

He prefers rocket science, but need's must.

"We're almost ready to leave; give me half an hour," the woman says. Then she looks up. "We're not in a hurry, are we? You wouldn't have _walked_ , right?"

Tony thinks he could fall for her, at least for a while. But, bad idea, recent break-up and an ex-teammate's wife, not going there.

"We've time enough," he assures her, stepping from foot to foot to keep the kid settled. Nate is mostly asleep, sucking on a purple dummy. "You've got no idea how fantastic it feels to talk to someone capable of logical thought." He didn't mean to say that, but he's so, so fucking tired, it's chronic, whatever meagre amount of sleep he manages doesn't seem to help.

Laura makes a sympathetic sound from the bathroom. "Not a lot of those people going around lately," she says grimly.

"Should I say I'm sorry?" he inquires, and then feels inexcusably childish when Lila gives him an incredulous look from the staircase. He barrels forth, since there's nothing for it at this point. "I feel like I should say sorry, but I'm not sure what for, and I don't honestly even feel that sorry. Maybe about Barnes or for Barnes or – actually, how much do you know about what's happened?"

Laura pauses in the bathroom door, holding a bright blue sports bag full of stuff in one hand and a make-up case in the other. "Captain America said jump. Clint dropped everything, asking how high. Now he's on the lam, and my children are easy bait."

"I'm sorry," Tony says automatically. It definitely sounds like the thing to say.

Laura nods, understanding dawning in her eyes. "It's not just about regret. It's also about sympathy." Oh. Right. That. He knew that. Really, he did. "And you, Mr Stark-"

"Tony?" he suggests. This sounds like a 'Tony' conversation.

"-Tony, are the only one to show me any. Despite…"

Tony waves his hand. He knows what she means – Barton, Rogers, stubbornness, failure to listen, RAFT, fight, betrayal and more betrayal. He doesn't want to talk about it.

"And I didn't expect it. Looks like nobody expected it. But you're here, and I think everybody's wrong. Everybody's…"

"Everything's fuc- uhh…" Tony looks at the creature in his arms. It's a future human being, and he should probably keep the language PG, but he doesn't remember how. He thinks he was probably never taught how. Howard certainly wouldn't have censored himself around his child.

"Yes." The woman nods. "It is. And you and I – we're the ones left here to deal with it. And it's… it's already easier now than it was half an hour ago when I was _alone_."

Tony doesn't know how to understand that. He takes time to think, but it's okay because Laura's busy herding Cooper and Lila and packing what looks at a glance as half the household, but eventually turns out to be a very reasonable amount of things. They fit into her car, leaving enough space for all three children.

Not for Tony, but he's got the suitcase suit, and he's fully intended to be their bodyguard on the way to the jet.

As he hands off Wee Nate to be strapped down into a fearsome looking contraption on the backseat of the car, he says: "You're right."

Laura finds it in herself to smile. Tough fucking cookie.

"Where are we going?" asks Cooper, clutching a cell phone in his hands between his knees. He's looking at Tony with suspicion but not outright hatred, and that's better than Tony had dared hope for.

"That's actually-" He turns to Laura. "I was going to offer you a safe house and new identities, and the offer stands, but if-"

"Stark Tower?" Laura cuts in.

Tony shrugs. He shouldn't. He knows he shouldn't. They wouldn't be exactly safe.

But he's alone, and tired, and selfish, so he at least puts it out there.

Laura nods. "Stark Tower it is. Let's go."

"You know your husband will blame me for – this all," he mentions under his breath, so that the kids don't hear. This has got to be horrible for them.

Laura raises her eyebrows and replies, just as quietly: "My husband is a criminal, _Tony_. And however I personally feel about him and his actions, the fact remains that I have to put my children first. And I don't want _him_ to have any legal rights to them."

"I'll try to make it right."

She shakes her head. "I'm not sure it's wrong now. And, regardless, even if everyone's pardoned, it will happen years down the road. And some of us don't have the luxury of checking out for that long." She looks at the kids.

Tony looks at them, too. Thinks about JARVIS. About Vision and Dummy.

About Howard.

"I can't promise you a lot," he says. "But I promise I'll try. My _fucking_ best." Oops. Expletive.

Laura elbows him in the ribs – _ow_ , he's bruised to all hell and currently unarmored – and scoffs at him. "When did you _fucking_ not?"

x

Coulson calls back. Several times, actually, but Tony doesn't bother picking up until the Barton situation is as resolved as he can make it at two a.m. It's a temporary fix, but short of a full-scale attack on the Stark Tower (he's reclaimed it; it was well past the highest time) they are safe.

Tony can't get Laura's expression of barely-contained hopeless rage out of his head, so when Friday tells him who is calling, he can't be bothered with even a mask of civility.

"What did I do now?" he snaps. "Cause the global warming? Run over your pet puppy?"

"Thank you, Stark," Coulson says tonelessly. "For being the bigger man, despite knowing how thankless it would be."

Tony scoffs, suppressing nausea. "Contradicting yourself already? Let's cut down on your phone bill and to the chase, Agent. What do you want, and why do you want it at two fifteen in the morning?"

"You weren't asleep," Coulson says, as if that is an explanation for anything. There's silence for a while. It seems like he's hung up, but Coulson isn't the type to leave alone until he's got what he's come for, so Tony isn't really surprised by the next words coming down from the speakers: "I do appreciate what you've done, Mr Stark. And I truly am sorry for parts of what was done to you."

" _Parts of_ , huh?" Tony doesn't laugh, although he's tempted to.

"Parts of," Coulson confirms. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you found out I was alive."

Subject change? Unlikely, Tony thinks. Probably just a sneak trying to sneakily sneak up on a point.

"Took me a while to figure it out," Tony replies. "Long enough for the hurt to run its course and leave its scars." He's not delving any deeper into it. It's enough to have mentioned how much of a dick Coulson was for leaving his – friends? acquaintances? – to grieve. Pepper cried. Barton's been off for months even after psych cleared him post-Loki; Romanov couldn't stand her spy-twin's presence to the point that she started fluttering around Rogers instead. Coulson's death might or might not have been the thing that started the end of the Avengers – but then, it was arguably the thing that started the Avengers in the first place.

It's a funny idea. The entire team was built upon the base of Coulson giving up the ghost.

"Until you called me, it didn't occur to me that you knew," says the agent. "I couldn't imagine you not telling your teammates if you discovered yet another secret SHIELD had kept from you."

Tony has known for a long time. He considered telling in the beginning, naturally, full of resentment and indignation, but it became a question of whom to tell first, then whom to tell and then _why tell anyone at all_? Then Rogers started haranguing him about keeping secrets while running around with Wilson and telling nobody what he was doing… and contrary to popular belief, Tony can keep someone else's secrets even in spite of peer pressure and emotional extortion.

Surely if Coulson wanted somebody to know, he would have informed them.

And if Coulson didn't want anyone to know, then so long. He could go fuck himself.

"Did you want something?" Tony asks. "It's so late it's early, and I've got a bed that cost more than your year's pay waiting for me. And a girl in it that cost near as much," he lies.

"I wanted to ask what you wanted. You called me first – and I doubt you would have done that just to say 'screw you'."

'Screw you' in Coulson's bland voice sounds almost hilarious. He can convey air quotes through a barely-there change of tone.

"I honestly didn't expect to be accused of monstrosity," Tony says dryly. "I probably should have – where Rogers leads, his fanbase follows-"

"What do you need from me?" Coulson cuts in pragmatically. "I am not making any promises in advance, but as far as I am concerned, we are still working toward the same goal." He words it broadly enough that Tony can't even really protest.

It _is_ , after all, why he called Coulson in the first place.

Tony doesn't even know the answer to the agent's question. Whatever it was, he's given up on it once the blame-game started. He knows he can't ever win the blame-game. There's no point in trying.

"Guess I just wanted someone to confirm that there's still somebody fighting," he admits, but only because this hurts Coulson more than it hurts him.

A dream demolished.

"Are you giving up?!" Coulson demands. There's a minute note of emotional upheaval toward the end of the sentence.

"Am I?" Tony's never fucking going to give up – he's the _Iron Man_. That's the point. Funny how they haven't got it. Eight years of superherodom, and they still haven't noticed he's an actual person under the amalgam of deliberately induced misperceptions. "And why shouldn't I? Everyone else has gone to ground; why should I offer up my neck for you bunch of backstabbing bastards?"

"I still don't understand what happened, Stark. I can't believe it of… Clint is… once he gives his loyalty, he will never go back on it."

"Tell that to Laura," Tony returns. He's not proud of himself, it's an ugly thing to say, and he probably shouldn't use Laura as an argument, but he's… he's _incensed_ on her behalf. If it was just him, sure, he fucked up. He's not the only one who did, he's just the only one raked over coals for it and… that's nothing new.

He can deal with it. He's made of _iron_ , and encased in titanium and gold. He can deal.

But Laura? A civilian woman with three children, left on her own, an unprotected target for everyone who wants to get at the rogue Avengers; Barton just drew a huge fucking bull's eye all over his family.

"I don't know what he was thinking." Coulson sounds rough, almost angry. "It's a running theme that he sees better from distance – maybe his family was just too close while he focused on something on the horizon."

"That's worth fuck-all to the people he left behind," Tony spits.

"Following Captain America into battle – it's hard to think of that as something _wrong_." The sentence is full of terrible, guts-squashing disappointment.

And Coulson didn't even have a vibranium shield put through his arc reactor. Just a jerk from a century ago stomping all over his youthful ideals.

Tony snorts. "How lucky that Nazis are so universally evil. World War Two totally black-and-white'd the entire concept of 'Captain America'. I'm sure Stevie Rogers was a _swell fella_ , but we've put an officer of a comparatively low rank in charge of a task force responsible for planetary safety, and then were surprised when he crashed and burned as soon as politics came into it."

"You were supposed to cover the politics side of-"

"I tried! I tried my best! You think he listened to me for half a fucking second? No! Fanboys like you filled his head with tales of how awesome he is! How right, how _absolutely good_!" He clenches his jaw and breathes through the ripping pain in his chest – actual physical pain – it isn't a great idea to tense and yell and gesture expansively around fractured ribs. Good to know. Feeling a little less incandescent and a little more helpless, he tries to speak in full sentences. "The instance someone disagreed with him, he knew they were in the wrong. And I've already been labeled a problem from the start. It must have been very easy to imagine that I was disagreeing with him because _I had a problem with his authority_."

"I can't believe a man of your intellect couldn't find a way to convince Captain Rogers to his point of view," Coulson says stiffly.

Tony shakes his head. "Yes, of course. I should have manipulated him. I should have known all that talk of trust between teammates was just talk." He smirks with sheer schadenfreude, getting to say: "Rogers certainly proved that, in the end."

Coulson takes a moment to himself, calming down or preparing a counter-strike. "I have read Natasha's assessment of you."

"I know. You've said so, when you came to me, begging for help to recover Barton from Loki."

"I've disagreed with the assessment," Coulson claims. If he wants to sound believable, he should put more emotion into it. Maybe start with any emotion at all. "You were reconsidered for the team on my discretion. And, Stark, I have never once regretted that decision."

"That's good. That's exactly what I would have said in your place. I can already feel it working, and I _know_ it's just a bunch of manipulative bullshit." Fuck, one of these days Tony will absolutely learn to not put his faith in people. Totally. He'd have thought that betrayal by Captain America could have cured his terminal condition, but it looks like he needs a couple more punches still. "I shouldn't have called you."

"Why did you?"

Desperation. Why else? SHIELD dropped the ball on the Avengers and the Avengers dropped the ball on Tony, and Tony is left standing here holding the fucking ball with no one to cover his back. He thought… he's not sure what he thought. Maybe that Coulson looked like he gave a damn, and like he was good at his job.

Maybe he just needs to tell somebody, with complete honesty, what he thinks of them.

"What are you going to do now?" Coulson asks, worried. Wow. _Emotion_.

As if Tony would tell him. No, this is a fool's errand, and Tony isn't going to give Coulson any more ammunition than he has to.

"Drink my expensive Scotch," Tony replies with a flash of a grin, cheap and fake. "Invent something awesome." Something that will let Rhodey walk again. "Make more money. Laugh into the face of anyone that comes to me begging for help – yeah, looking at you here, Agent Kay."

He claps his hands faux-happily and walks out of the room, gesturing toward the camera. Coulson can stay on the line and try and wheedle shit out of Friday for as long as he wants – Friday deserves to have some fun, too.

And Tony? Tony is going to do what he should have done a long time ago.

He's going to take over the world.

x

The next Accords conference is held in Brussels. For Tony it means travel-time wasted, listening to people natter on in French, and a hotel apartment.

"Boss?" Friday says from her mobile setup on the coffee table when Tony walks out of the bathroom. "There was someone at the reception, wishing to speak with you. Her request was denied by the receptionist, who threatened to have her removed from the premises-"

"Who?" Tony cuts in. Pepper would have called him, and so would Laura. Natasha would have just turned up in his room with Bites at the ready. Maybe a knife, if she was feeling particularly bloodthirsty.

"She has stated her name as Elizabeth Ross. Facial recognition confirmed."

A flood of adrenaline chases away all wishful thoughts of the hotel bed, and Tony dives for clothes. He by-passes the suit and pulls on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt – he is beyond rich enough to flaunt the dress code.

"Where is she now?"

"Hotel bar. She has ordered two drinks."

"Beautiful and brilliant," Tony remarks. "No wonder Bruce was smitten." His hair is a wet mess, but he is pretty sure that inviting Dr Ross to his hotel room would result in a lot worse press than meeting her straight out of a shower. He isn't entirely sure – people are hopelessly nonsensical on the best of days – but decides to risk it.

He hears the consecutive waves of silence and frantic gossip roll over the bar as he enters. It is too early in the evening for a properly relaxed atmosphere, and the bar is a little too full for his taste; he nevertheless spots his mark immediately, and perches on a barstool next to her, one elbow on the counter and foot firmly planted in his mouth: "Come here often?"

Ross gapes at him as if he has just crashed in through the ceiling and sat up in a pile of rubble. She is – well, beautiful seems like too common a word for someone like that. Tony can't believe Thunderbolt could have sired a creature this lovely (plus the idea of Mrs Ross cheating on the shitstain fills him with glee). Her eyes are light and full of fire, even though it is obvious that she has been through a lot of stress and possibly an illness lately.

Then she grins.

Tony reminds himself forcefully that this is the Laura Barton situation all over again. A lovely, fiery, clever woman – that he is not allowed to touch. Bro code. Despite the very, very weird Bruce-and-Natasha thing. This is _Bruce's Betty_.

"Dr Stark," she says, and pushes the second glass to him.

"No one's called me 'doctor' in a very long time," Tony mentions in complete honesty. It is as though people forget that little detail in the face of the money and the sex scandals and the Iron Man. In fact, the only one who has ever called him 'doctor' was Rhodey, in a mocking tone, for about as long as it took them to get drunk when they celebrated after Tony finally got the PhD (the first one, Rhodey's too classy to have repeated the joke for Tony's subsequent academic achievements).

"Well," says Dr Ross, "I have read your dissertations, and I was impressed, and I shall call you 'doctor', unless you have objections."

Tony prefers being called 'Tony', but he is flexible. "Sounds kinky. Thanks for the drink." He doesn't drink it, though, because he hasn't seen it being poured, and too many people would like to get rid of him. It isn't even that he suspects Dr Ross of being in collusion with her father – the opposite is far more likely – but Thunderbolt's managed to extort his daughter before.

"Thanks for coming down to talk to me," she says, ignoring the flirting, and then steels herself to talk about what she's come for. "I've _combed_ through the reports, and there's no mention of him. I don't think my Father has him – he's been smug before the prosecutions started, but not that smug – and I'm… worried. I know I've given up every right I had to him, but if you know anything…"

She is good. Pretty face, and knows how to use it. Tony would want to tell her if he knew anything, but he doesn't know her nearly well enough, and he's not sure she could keep it from her Father.

"He hasn't come by to sign the Accords," Tony mentions glibly. "Had to strike him from the official roster. But as long as he doesn't appear anywhere, he's not my problem."

Dr Ross' eyes narrow. Her fingers tighten on the glass, and she looks like she's about to fling it into Tony's face; he's ready to close his eyes, doesn't want the sting of alcohol in them if he can help it.

"He's _not_ \- I always considered Bruce a _privilege_ rather than a _problem_ ," she says very softly. "And I wouldn't be here if I didn't think you were of the same mind-"

"Bruce did the smartest thing he could," Tony replies at the same volume. "If he were there during the throw-down, he'd either be locked up by your Father or holed up with the other fuckers-"

Ross snorts and slugs Tony's shoulder with bony, bony knuckles. He'll have another bruise.

" _Poppycock_. We both know that Bruce may run from us, but he'll never hurt us. If the Hulk likes you that much – and I've seen the footage, I know how much he liked you from the start – he'd never side against you. Not for _her_ , and not for Captain America."

She takes a deep breath and moves closer, so close that Tony smells her perfume, and it becomes a struggle not to reach out and touch her.

"I don't know who did what, or who said what, or how this – this schism happened. I didn't come here because I believe you were right and Captain America was wrong."

"You came here because you thought I could help you find your ex," Tony states. This has been obvious; neither of them has pretended otherwise. He isn't sure what motivates her – it could be love and regret as easily as it could be a noose around her neck. Does she have a kid that could have been napped? It's possible. Tony hasn't stalked her over the past few years.

Friday could find out, but for now Tony remembers the look in Laura's eyes when her children were in danger and knows with certainty that there could be things Dr Ross would put above Bruce's wellbeing.

"I came here," she breathes with a faint scent of wine, "because Bruce knew he could trust you, and I trust Bruce."

Tony's very glad that he doesn't know where his science bro's hiding, because he's tempted to tell. He's generally _tempted_.

There's a commotion outside. Someone shouts.

As of yet it hasn't escalated into violence, but it sounds like violence is being threatened.

"Were you followed?" Tony inquires.

"Probably," she admits. "If not, then someone's put a photo of us on Instagram and by now it's around the globe."

"There are moments," Tony lies, "when I hate the internet."

She laughs into his face.

"My room?" he suggests.

"Might as well."

They continue the conversation there. Tony doesn't tell her what she wants to hear and Dr Ross doesn't have sex with him, even though it's obvious they are both attracted. Instead, they hatch a plan.

x

"You lost someone, didn't you," Laura says, setting a mug onto the coffee table in front of Tony and sitting down next to him on the couch. It's late; they are both tired, and the TV is muted because Tony isn't interested in the weather forecast or in searching for anything engaging to watch.

"Whom didn't I lose?" Tony returns fatalistically.

Laura shakes her head, sipping her cocoa and gesturing at the mug she's brought for him. It smells fantastic, but Tony experiences some sort of cognitive dissonance. He can't convince himself that the drink would still be there if he reached for it. It's far more likely it would vanish like a wisp of smoke, escaping through his fingers.

Most things seem to, lately.

"I mean, like…" Laura searches for words that wouldn't bare the starkness of the wound to the world, but eventually gives it up as an impossible task. "Like family," she says. "Like – a child. That's why you thought of us first. You came back from wherever you were fighting all banged up, and the first thing you did was check on everyone's family."

Tony shrugs. "I don't have my own to check on. Figured I might as well try." Aside from Barton, the only one of Cap's bootlickers who has family is Lang. Tony had a quick, discreet look, and found (in an aggressive way) that Pym's got them covered.

Laura punches his arm, not hard enough to hurt him, but enough to clearly express her displeasure. "Self-effacement doesn't suit you. But if you don't want to talk about it-"

"I don't," Tony cuts in resolutely. He hasn't gotten over the loss of his parents in more than twenty years – it's getting easier now, having found some perspective, but he's still fucked up about it.

He doesn't think he'll even _begin_ to get over the loss of JARVIS in this lifetime.

"Drink your cocoa," Laura orders him.

Tony does. It's sweet. It doesn't vanish like smoke. At all.

He tries to think about what he'll have to do next. Laura can stay here for a while, and to toddler Nate it's all the same right now, but Cooper and Lila need more. They need schools and peers and… honestly, he's just pulling this crap out of his ass, he has no idea. Laura will have to walk him through this.

"Is this a private party or can I join?" Betty asks from the doorway. She's a vision in a pair of pajama pants, a tank top and an open night robe lackadaisically thrown over them.

Laura stares at her, reflexively judgmental.

"Betty Ross," says Betty, coming forward and offering her hand.

"Laura. _Barton_ , for the time being," replies Laura, shaking the hand without standing.

It's like watching the clash of two titans; Tony would prefer to keep a far greater distance, but then there is a sort of shift in the atmosphere and the tension lessens. Apparently, the two women are not going to get into a catfight.

Tony doesn't really get the territory-thing. Aside from his workshop, that is – the workshop's a sacred place, and by extension so is Bruce's lab (Tony hasn't touched it beyond disposing of the stuff that doesn't store well enough). Besides, the Tower is all his territory, now that Pepper's moved out ( _except for Bruce's lab_ , but just watch Tony ignore that little detail).

"There's some cocoa on the counter, if you'd like," Laura offers. It's either some arcane challenge issued from one female to another, or an overture of friendly acquaintanceship.

"I'd love to," Betty says with a tired smile, "but then I couldn't sleep for the next four hours, and I'm ready to drop. Friday said that you were here and…"

Tony glances at Laura. She seems like she, too, isn't entirely sure what's happening. It only now occurs to him that he should have asked Laura before bringing Betty here – he's not used to extending that kind of consideration, but it's a responsibility he's accepted when he invited the Bartons to stay here. Senator Ross' daughter as a house guest would be a cause for concern.

"Crap," he mutters. "Look, _Maid Marian_ , if you're worried-"

"It's…" Laura takes a deep breath. Her eyes bore into Betty. "Miss Ross is trustworthy, I take it?"

Tony looks at his hands. Trustworthy? What does that even mean? Is anyone trustworthy these days? Would Laura accept such a claim, after the shit her husband did to her?

"We are in similar positions, Mrs Barton," Betty replies tightly. "Except I didn't have the time to marry him and have children."

Laura's frown shifts from suspicious to confused. "Which…?"

"Bruce Banner."

Tony jumps to his feet. He feels a sympathetic vagina growing in his underbelly, and he needs to get out of here right the fuck now, before he starts thinking about carrying someone's kids. He's already popped out kids, if A.I.s count (and they do), so his biological clock ought to be well and satisfied.

"I'm sorry," Laura says.

"So am I," replies Betty.

Obscure, indecipherable interpersonal rituals.

"Uh…" Tony tries. His hands speak much more eloquently, but it still comes out as gibberish.

Laura nods at him, accepting the unexpected addition to their little household of left-behind dregs.

"Did you need anything?" he asks Betty.

Betty assaults him. It turns out to be a fast, hard hug, but it takes him a little bit to realize this.

"Thank you, Tony."

"Stop, stop that-"

"No, really, I just-"

"Ugh, stop saying things, woman," Tony bats at her to get her further away from him, "I've got money, I give money to people, it's in the job description of a philanthropist, I don't need to listen to this-"

He moves backwards away from them. It doesn't seem like a good idea to turn his back on them.

"What… just happened?" Laura stares at him as if she's never before seen an attacked guy retreat into a safe distance.

"Tony?"

His eyes move to Betty. "Yes, _isotope_?"

" _Thank you_?"

"Augh!" he yells. "Stop that! Both of you! Right now. Can't a man have his allergies respected?" he runs for the elevator. "Friday, workshop. Blackout. Don't let them in."

"Allergies?" Laura inquires.

Betty sighs. "Drama queen."


	2. Can't Believe That Happened

Chapter Two: Can't Believe That Happened

x

Tony walks into his office, notices the presence of a person that definitely shouldn't be there, and sets his body on autopilot while he tries to figure out what now.

From the outside it looks like he just goes on without registering the intrusion, opens a cabinet, pulls out an empty folder and from behind it recovers a full bottle. It's a bad habit to have so ingrained that he does it without thinking, he's aware, but Friday is counting and she'll cut him off the moment he's beyond the limit they have negotiated between them.

If Tony falls back into addiction now, the whole Earth is doomed.

On the other hand, booze will make him not care that the Earth is doomed, so he's shelved it as plan Z.

"Hey, Nick. Did Agent Agent run to you to tattle on me?"

"Came to me in tears," Fury deadpans. "Cried his black little heart out on my knee. Said you broke it."

Tony grins. He can't believe that he's missed Fury, what the fuck?

Admittedly, he's never appreciated how just much work Fury did to shield him (alright, not him personally, it was 'the Avengers', but right now Tony personally _is_ 'the Avengers', so semantics) from the idiotic and power-hungry politicians. Tony had so many fights on that field that it just didn't occur to him that there should have been more of them.

When Tony finally turns around, he finds Fury's sitting cross-legged in his ergonomic, Pepper-picked chair, one eye solemnly watching Tony over steepled fingers. The (still black but) very tight turtleneck looks ridiculous on him. Kind of swish.

"Are you here to punch me in the face for him?" Tony asks. It's possible, but unlikely.

Fury doesn't need his fists to express himself.

"Nah." The man sets his right leg on the floor as well and stands, palms on Tony's desk, leaning forwards in a slightly intimidating way.

Tony's so un-scared that it makes him smile.

"How's Laura Barton?" asks Fury.

Tony blinks. "Who?"

Fury nods. He switches gears. "How's Dr Ross?"

Tony grins. "Fantastic. We're getting married, haven't you heard? You haven't? You should fire your spy agency – oh, wait, Rogers already did it for you."

"You're playing a risky game, Stark. Big stakes."

Tony shrugs. He parks one ass cheek on his desk on top of some of Pepper's paperwork, but he's not particularly bothered. It's the first time he's dared encroach upon Fury's personal space, and there's something really, really odd about confirming that you can recognize an LMD by body-heat and smell, if you don't let your eyes and ears fool you. "The stakes has always been the world, _Nick_. That didn't change just because your precious Captain went off to play a different game, where the stakes were _just_ the life of his best buddy."

"You could have helped him retrieve Barnes before it became an issue."

"He could have told me Barnes was alive and he was looking for the guy."

"You knew."

"I didn't know Barnes murdered my parents." Shit. Tony shouldn't have said that. Fury is far too good at riling him up and herding him where he wants him. "But Rogers did. And so did Zemo."

"So did I," Fury points out.

Tony sighs. "But you didn't spend three years bitching at me for keeping secrets from you." And he jabs the data stick in his hand into Fury's solar plexus.

It wouldn't have had any effect on the actual flesh-and-blood Fury, but the latest LMD designs have a flaw there, and Tony knows better than to walk around unarmed when he isn't in the suit. Office supplies are the best disguises for weapons and gear – a tranq gun pen, a transceiver pair of paperclips, a shock data stick. He felt like Q when he designed them. He feels a little like Bond when a quiet sizzle sounds and the light behind Fury's eyes goes out.

Tony catches the android and sets it down onto the floor.

It is a very, very nice gift from Fury.

Or not Fury?

x

"Mr Stark, a moment of your time?"

Tony spins, conditioned by Pepper to listen to a certain tone used in combination with clicking heels and a fuck-off executive suit that wouldn't be out of place on the cover of an adult movie.

There, in the little vestibule thing containing the elevator doors and the emergency staircase access stands Maria Hill, cooler than a Cullen and brandishing a phone that is less a piece of communications technology and more a prop.

"Are you still around? Didn't know you were still around."

Hill levels him a look that loudly doubts his acuity. "It is a good thing that you stepped down as CEO and let Pepper take over. You are hopeless in any kind of management position."

Tony shrugs. "Not a people person. All those fiddly squishy bits – makes me nervous," his hands flutter around him, illustrating, distracting, constructing a wall of implied yet absent double meanings. "Give me something that explodes-"

"My contract is still with S.I.-" meaning it is still Tony who pays her, "-but as my duties were always primarily Avengers-related, I took over most liaison positions." She raises the phone briefly, and then slides it into the pocket of her form-fitting suit jacket.

Coulson. Of course. Ran to teacher and tattled, and Tony didn't even do anything. This has been his life since forever – he's mostly just grimly amused by it, except for the moments when it makes things needlessly yet more difficult that they already are.

"You in contact with them?" he inquires, hypnotising the elevator into arriving post haste.

JARVIS would have been on the case. Friday's not quite perceptive enough yet.

"Depends on what you mean by 'them', Mr Stark," says ex-Agent Hill. "I have no contact with the fugitives. There is a conversation opened with Wakanda, although so far I have not spoken with the King or his sister personally. I am also in sporadic contact with Vision."

"He doesn't call _me_ ," Tony says before he can think better of it.

And what? It's the truth. He doesn't need to feel ashamed. Or abandoned. Vision is the lovechild of Helen Cho, Wanda Maximov and Loki's scepter, hatched out of JARVIS' ravaged corpse, and he doesn't have any obligation to Tony.

"I did not take no for an answer, and threatened consequences," replies Hill and then _ding_ -

The elevator's here.

Tony gets in with a mocking little wave and lets it carry him upwards, away from the mean spy. He doesn't want to talk about Vision. Vision got a crush and it fucked over his life. Now he's trying to find out what it means to be a self-sufficient, self-possessed adult person.

Tony applauds the effort. He's never figured it out for himself.

x

Tony surveys Betty over the coffee table laden with coffee and coffee-related stuff. Biscuits and cookies and crumpets and tartlets litter the surface. Betty daintily picks up a pastry with strawberries on top.

Strawberries, check. Good to know.

"I can honestly say I haven't done this before," confides Tony. "You're my first."

Betty catches his pass and dutifully replies: "Don't worry, Tony. I'll be gentle."

She's so Bruce-like they might start finishing one another's sentences soon.

"I have pretended that I was not in a relationship – neither of us were out, business concerns, blah, blah, blah," Tony waves his hand as if that could disperse the nasty stink of the memory, "but that went bad pretty quickly and ended up with blackmail, business espionage and a professional crook hired to get back some importunate pictures."

"Example of what not to do?" Betty snags another pastry.

Tony bets that she hasn't eaten lunch, maybe skipped straight over breakfast, too. Too busy taking over Bruce's lab. He feels uneasy about letting her have at it, but if he didn't the place would become a mausoleum, and that's not something he wants in his home.

"Don't spy on my company?" he suggests.

Lizzy quirks a smile. "It'll be my company, too, soon enough. But – obviously."

"We're signing a pre-nup."

"Was that ever in question?"

"Gasp." Tony theatrically puts a hand on the scar where his arc reactor used to be. "You're not in this for my money?"

"No, I'm in this for your lab and your science bro."

The lab is hers, with the understanding that if Bruce comes back, she will hand it over to the rightful owner. Bruce… well, Bruce has always been hers, and how Tony feels about it doesn't really matter.

He grins, wide and photogenic. "And pissing off your Father – don't even pretend, I can see right through you. If Howard was alive, I'd so be riding the same train, _Lady Morgana_. So, how do we do this?"

"Let's start with a crash course on faking it." She's practical. She's also wrong.

Tony keeps the grin, just lets the artificiality of it emerge. "Learn to fake _tolerating_ me. That's the hard part. The rest of it will be a cakewalk- ow!"

He gives her an injured look, rubbing his ankle.

Bets is unmoved. "Shut up and start learning what I like. There will be a pop quiz."

x

Tony stands in the middle of his workshop, hands on his hips, watching the beautiful craftsmanship wasted on Fury's ugly mug. Life Model Decoy. A functional LMD. All his.

His presssioussss.

"Call, Boss," Friday alerts him. "Number designated _Imhotep_ -"

"Pick up," orders Tony. The texture of silence coming from the speaker changes. "Got your pressie," he says with as much obnoxious mirth as he can stuff in the short sentence. "Apology accepted."

"I am certain," Coulson replies slowly, "that I have no idea what you're ta-"

"The Nick Fury Action Figure, Deluxe Edition." There's another moment of silence on the other end of the line while Coulson tries to integrate the statement into his worldview. Once it seems like he's almost got it, Tony follows up with: "Would have gone with _Nick Fury blow-up doll_ , but he doesn't really blow up so well. I tried."

Coulson chokes.

There's a rustle and everything muffles as the super secret agent puts his palm over the microphone, underestimating just how sensitive it really is, and Tony can barely but definitely hear…

…laughter.

"Are you drunk?" he asks. He can't really imagine Coulson drunk, but suddenly he wants to. This is a brave new world, Tony's not an Avenger, Natasha Romanov's not a SHIELD agent, SHIELD is not even a legitimate thing anymore, and Coulson has rediscovered his sense of humor after he and Tony yelled at one another. Or had some new one implanted when they resurrected him.

Who even cares?

Of all the SHIELD agents he has ever met, Tony actually likes _Maria Hill_ the best, however much she disconcerts him. But he's used to giving Coulson a lot of latitude – sentimentality and Pepper's steady, long-term influence – and Coulson only ever abused that latitude once.

Admittedly, that was when Loki took Barton, so Tony is ready to forget. Not forgive – since JARVIS' death he found that rudeness toward the A.I. became an unforgivable crime in his mind – but he can move past it by pretending it never happened.

Coulson gets a hold of himself and raises the phone to his ear again. "No-"

"Do you want to be?" Tony cuts in.

"God, yes."

There's yet another while of silence on both sides while both men realize what has just been said and how they want to react to it.

"Mr Stark-"

"Friday, coordinates?" Tony speaks over Coulson. This is too good an opportunity to miss, and he's promised himself this afternoon off, anyway. It's verging on evening now, and the storm is making it dark outside, but he's absolutely game.

Friday displays Coulson's coordinates on the nearest screen – it's doable. A little out of the way – by which he means as far as you could get and still be in the United States – but Tony's the Iron Man.

"You cannot-"

"ETA?"

"Fifty minutes, Boss, counting the elevator ride."

Tony laughs. "Let's. Agent, I'll be there within the hour. Wear a suit you don't mind getting wet. The game is on!"

Tony's already moving across the room, snagging a plaid shirt off the back of a chair. With the beard he hasn't bothered trimming in a while and the grown-out hair, he'll look lumberjack chic enough that no casual observer should connect him to himself.

"Stark, you cannot be serious. I have obligations. I have a team. I have-"

"The night off," Tony informs him. "You'll go spare if you remain cooped up in the Bus all the time and you know it. The kids are out, the Cavalry's keeping guard, and if the rumors floating around about her are true, she so doesn't need your help."

Coulson sighs. "She glared at me and told me to _get the fuck out_."

"That a quote?" Tony exits the elevator and moves toward the landing pad. Friday has already lit it up for him.

"Direct," Coulson confirms, sounding about as tired as Tony feels.

Tony checks that he's got his Amex on him – there it is in the back pocket – and hops out into the rain.

x

Forty-seven minutes later he arrives in the asscrack of tundra.

There is a lot of snow on the ground. It softens the landing, so Tony touches down almost quietly. Also on the plus side, it isn't raining here.

Coulson – or at least a bundled up shape that could be anyone, but Tony hopes is Coulson, because it is in possession of Coulson's phone, and Tony is patently not in the mood for a rescue mission – stands under the awning of a house that seems to double as the airport central in this gods-forsaken place. From the distance of twenty darkened yards in the shadow of the Bus, over eye-wateringly bright blue snow, Tony only sees a parka with a fur-lined hood pulled low.

Not wanting to scratch the finish with unnecessary bullets, he disengages the mask. "Fancy meeting you here, stranger," he says.

Coulson startles.

He moves, and suddenly there's a cone of light coming from his hand – a flashlight, how mundane – that hits Tony after a few seconds of searching.

"That's a new one," the agent says coming closer. "I expected AC/DC and a bright streak across the sky."

Tony grins. He's not angry anymore – not at this man. Apology honestly accepted. "I know my audience. This impressed you more." He lets Coulson come close enough that they can see each other's face without the flashlight. It's very dark for a moment; then their eyes adjust.

Coulson doesn't seem to believe his, though, because he blinks a couple of times, and rubs a glove over them.

"Stealth mode," Tony explains. When he moves he can be seen, but in this place – the dark and the snow – he's pretty much invisible. It doesn't appeal to his sense of showmanship, but it's worth it for the expression on Agent Agent's face.

"Helicarrier?" guesses Coulson.

Tony shrugs. "Similar. I devised my own way, but it's the same principle. Only far more refined, because I couldn't use panels, and the armor doesn't run on solar energy." The helicarriers are all equipped with an arc reactor now, but those are meant to only be used in case of emergency. "Thought I stole it? You've got that the other way around, _Mr Kuryakin_. It's always _your_ people stealing _my_ tech."

For a moment it looks like Coulson will argue – he doesn't have a leg to stand on, but Fury's strategy of aggressive acquisition does make sense in the context of an impending war against aliens. Tony's not offering blanket forgiveness, but he's here, and he's willing to _cooperate_ (though not to prostitute himself to an agency – not again).

In the end Coulson says simply: "There's an inn about ten minutes that way." He waves his hand at the forest of impenetrable darkness.

"Walking?" Tony inquires. His facial plate falls shut.

Coulson's eyes widen. "Don't even-"

Tony grabs the man, holds him securely against his side, and off they fly.

They land in front of the inn in seventy-two seconds, because Friday needed a while to scan for the correct building and set up the navigation. Under his breath Coulson is cursing impressively – in an impressive number of languages, too, not all of which Tony recognizes. He's also threatening bodily harm, and Tony hesitates for a moment before he dares exit the suit. It closes, empty, and with the stealth mode engaged Tony can barely identify where it's standing, despite the orange light coming from the windows and the two solitary lampposts overlooking a mostly empty parking lot.

Everything with the exception of the cars is capped with a solid layer of snow.

Tony is freezing in just a t-shirt and a shirt, so he grabs Coulson's gloved hand – ouch, _ice_ – and pulls the man along to the inside of the house. The atmosphere is mellow; there is a barmaid behind the counter, although Tony's not sure if women are still 'maids' when they have been dead for the last hundred and fifty years, but their glare scares everyone so much that no one dares point it out to them.

The handful of other patrons seem uninterested until they notice that Tony's walked in from Alaskan winter dressed for weather half a hemisphere away. They stare, for just long enough to activate Tony's 'the-public-is-watching' mask and let him breeze through demanding his alcohol from the crone.

She swipes his card, looking at it like it was used gum.

Tony and Coulson take their beers and shot glasses and bottle of Jägermeister to a table in the corner – as far from the counter as possible while still giving the impression of defensibility to appease their inner paranoiacs.

Tony pours the shots, trying to think of a fitting toast. At least an acceptable toast. He keeps returning to 'to not being alone and miserable', but that's so embarrassing that he doesn't want to say it out loud.

"When did you find out I'm alive?" asks Coulson.

They toast silently, and drink.

"You mean," Tony returns, "why didn't I tell the Avengers when I found out?"

"The _other_ Avengers," Coulson amends.

Tony shakes his head. " _The Avengers_. And, look, there's your answer."

There must be something in his face, because Coulson moves to sit closer – still round the corner of the table, but now their knees are touching under it. Coulson wears a green sweater with an adorable ice bear pattern. It must have been a gift; Coulson's not-so-secretly a huge dork – huge enough to collect Captain America memorabilia and not be ashamed of it, huge enough to wear patterned sweaters – but his tastes run in a diametrically different direction, as evidenced by his ties.

"What _do_ you want to talk about, then?" he asks.

"Not business," Tony replies promptly. "Not politics, not war or obligations or old hurts. Something pleasant. We can still find a _pleasant_ topic, right?" He feels defeated. He's exhausted, stomped into the ground, and desperately needs someone to give him a hands-up.

Coulson's hands are raw-pink, and encircling his beer glass.

"How 'bout them Mets, then?" Coulson grumbles out of the corner of his mouth, and then looks appalled at himself.

Tony laughs. Actually laughs for real. It's indescribably freeing.

" _Mets_ …!" he wheezes. "Of all the…"

Coulson grins, trying to hide behind the beer and failing.

"There's a story behind that," Tony guesses, and he's right. He's _so_ right. "Come on, Agent, spill. I'll buy you another beer. I'll face down that harpy for you, I'm sure that's worth a funny story, right?"

Coulson keeps grinning, and he starts to talk, describing his team in general terms (even though Tony knows who they are, has hacked them enough to recognize them in case they'll need help one day) and the wacky hijinks they call fieldwork. He obviously picks out just little bits here and there; it's not all fun, sometimes a team member's missing from a story because they're laid up with an injury, but he smoothly redacts the bad and sad and scary parts, and leaves just the anecdotes.

Two hours later they're on their way to properly drunk, and Friday's sent Tony a text informing him that he should be stopping _right now_.

"I was wrong," Coulson says softly, imparting a secret, leaning close enough that Tony feels the gust of breath against his ear.

"It happens," Tony agrees. Their elbows are touching. And their forearms. "You mean any particular instance?"

"When I told you – told you that, _not that much_. I was wrong." He looks regretful.

Tony doesn't like that look. He bumps Coulson's elbow with his, and then pokes his upper arm. Beneath the dorky sweater there's rock-hard muscle. "You weren't. You actually needed me _more_ than _either_ of us thought you would."

"…yes." Coulson hesitates, playing with an empty shot glass. "Stark-"

" _Agent-_ "

"How are _you_ the person sitting with me here?" the agent demands. "Just – how?"

Tony shrugs. "You abandoned everyone that gave a damn about you. I was abandoned by everyone about whom I gave a damn. Two magnets, opposite polarization?"

It sounds weirdly plausible – and not just to him.

"I didn't," Coulson tries to explain through the barrier of intoxication. "Didn't _abandon_."

Tony nods. And nods. It makes the room float a little. "I know. You 'died'." He mimes the air quotes.

Coulson shakes his head. "No. I died."

No emphasis.

"Like, actually?" Tony didn't know that. How didn't he know that? "Not just – you know, technically, for one minute and seventeen seconds your heart was not beating-"

"All the way," Coulson sounds out, as drunk people do when they want to make sure they are speaking distinctly.

Tony downs his last shot. He needs it.

His phone buzzes. Friday's informing him that she's not letting him back into the armor so he could kill himself in a traffic accident.

The bar has rooms upstairs. They rent them out – for the whole night, too, apparently.

Coulson's hands and feet are cold, and he grips like a man that hasn't touched another person in _years_. He's wound like a spring, and so into it that Tony momentarily considers if he isn't holding the Agent's twin or something.

But, no, there's the scar, it's definitely their Coulson – _his_ Coulson – the guy that saved Pepper and played babysitter when Tony was dying and kept Barton from shooting mortal Thor and stood against Loki with an experimental gun in his hands and not even a prayer.

"Been a while," Coulson mutters like an apology – so fucking unnecessary, as if Tony didn't know what body horror feels like and how sex sometimes seems like a prospect you couldn't face for all the money in the world.

"Are you too drunk?" Tony inquires. He's fine with an exchange of handjobs, it's okay – this evening's already a success, and a little physical closeness will tie it together nicely. He doesn't need a surrender of any kind from the man – definitely doesn't want anything that wouldn't be mutually enjoyable.

Coulson finds a purchase somewhere improbable and rolls them over, so that he's pinning Tony to the bed for a change. "No, I'm not."

"Why are you looking surprised?" Tony demands. He twitches when Coulson's icy hands creep under his t-shirt.

"Didn't expect you to be a gentleman."

Tony is used to that. It sometimes still feels like a punch to the kidneys – like now – but he guesses it is part and parcel of the playboy label. He doesn't think that if he were an actual jerk to people they would flock to him in droves, but maybe for a certain amount of money or media exposure, people are willing to get hurt.

He pulls Coulson down for a kiss. It's a bit too wild and uncoordinated – they both want too much too fast, and end up with a lot of intensity but little technique.

"That was a lie," Coulson admits, sitting up to work on divesting himself of more clothes. He finds Tony staring at him in confusion, and quirks a half-smile. "I knew you had to be a gentleman – Miss Potts wouldn't have stuck by you otherwise."

Tony doesn't want to talk about Pepper. Or hear about her. He's supposed to be getting over her.

"I just – I said it to see your reaction."

Tony snorts. "Working? Even now, Agent?" He finds a mouth-watering sinew in the man's neck and gently closes his teeth around it.

Coulson lets out a very interesting gasp. "No. Curious. Wanted – thought. But. People tell you. Told you before. That bullshit. And meant it." He clamps his hands around Tony's skull and pushes his head far away enough that they can maintain eye contact while he speaks. "Didn't know you needed to hear it, but you do. And I don't know about anyone else, but _I_ 've not doubted your capacity for generosity since Monaco."

" _Monaco_?" Tony repeats, and then remembers that he doesn't want to talk about this. He doesn't want to talk. He wants sex. "No, fuck that, c'mere."

Coulson goes quietly, with a wolfish smile that melts in the next kiss, and the rest of him is much, much warmer than his hands. His heart beats, fast but regular, and for all his blueballed eagerness he has enough skill to reduce Tony to a pleasantly pliant state.

It's been years since Tony shared a bed with someone _to sleep_.

He does sleep, though, feeling contented and comfortable, and for once manages almost six hours of continuous unconsciousness without any drugs but those that his body produces naturally (and a bit of booze).

x

Tony can't believe that happened.

x

There's an Asian woman standing under the wing of the Bus when Tony drops the Agent off in the morning. Mid-morning. He would have slept in, but Coulson insisted.

The woman looks like she chews nails for breakfast and washes them down with the blood of her enemies. There's nothing particularly off about her, it's just the entire ensemble – she's like the love-child of Lucy Lawless, Lucy Liu and Nick Fury. She scares him.

"The Cavalry, I presume?" Tony smarms, flipping up his facial plate and putting on his best public smile. He tries offering a hand and fully expects it to be ignored.

The woman looks at Coulson, rolls her eyes, and _shakes Tony's hand_.

"It's a pleasure," he says, not entirely honestly, but the discrepancy is just the scream of terror from his hindbrain. "Just out of curiosity, you wouldn't be interested in a post on a world-wide extreme-emergency-response task force? Kind of like the Avengers, but with a charter and official channels and a dental plan."

"Poaching is rude," Coulson points out.

"So is saying 'out for a pint, Mel' and coming back the next day looking well-shagged, with the date in tow," deadpans the Cavalry.

Coulson flushes.

Tony has to suppress a sound of glee at how cute that is. Natasha can fake blushes – he's seen her do it – but he's pretty sure that in Coulson the reaction's hundred percent genuine.

Before… just _before_ , Tony wasn't consciously aware of how much he liked _genuine_. In hindsight, it's undoubtedly what he found attractive about Rhodey and Pepper and Happy – about Bruce and Peter and Laura and Betty.

"He's not a date," Coulson protests – not the sort of thing someone says to a colleague, much less a subordinate officer, but the kind of defence one could mount against a teasing friend.

Huh. Tony didn't know the Cavalry teased. Legend has it, she doesn't have a sense of humor. At all.

"Right," the woman says dryly.

Coulson huffs. "I _didn't know_ it was a date."

Tony shrugs. "I didn't actually set out with the intention. But, animal magnetism – what can you do?" He flashes a grin at Agent May, and only afterwards realizes that he might have just committed suicide. Wait, no – he's in the armor. Good. Chances of survival rapidly climbing.

The Cavalry lifts one mouth corner, amused by his panicked reaction. "It's not worth the effort to tease Phil. He's too easy-"

"Hey," Coulson protests weakly.

"-and I've actually been waiting here to check who you are and how much I'm going to have to threaten you not to say anything compromising to anyone." She looks Tony in the eye, and he holds the gaze; a lot of his fear dissipates as he learns how much of her protectiveness is based in straightforward affection – he guesses that a lion's share of her reputation is due to a combination of frightening competence and an intense need for privacy.

If she said yes to Tony's half-assed recruitment speech, Tony would welcome her to the team (there isn't a team, yet, but he has to start somewhere) with banners and streamers and maybe strippers, if she's into that sort of thing.

She kind of looks like she might be.

"I don't need to threaten _you_ ," she concludes.

Tony's not sure if that's because she knows that Tony is trustworthy (unlikely) or because she judges him too chickenshit to do anything for fear of her (much more likely).

She slugs Coulson's shoulder and turns to climb back up into the plane. "If this assignment falls through," she adds over her shoulder, "I'll call you, Mr Stark."

Tony nods somewhat dumbly. "Be sure to." Then he stares at Coulson.

Coulson shrugs. "The ways of Melinda May are mysterious." He steps closer. He's a lot more civilian still than Tony's ever seen him be before, and the crack all across his customary composure is something Tony recognizes that he inflicted.

A little shyness, a little vulnerability – the emotional reaction of someone who doesn't have one night stands, who is used to sharing more in bed than just his body. That's why he was so starved for it: he doesn't do anonymous.

Tony's not in a good place for a relationship. He's not over Pepper, and the logistics of it would be a nightmare. Still, there's nothing that prevents him and Coulson taking another night off together sometimes.

The main reason why Tony hasn't gone out to find someone to fuck lately is that he can't trust anyone. Any stranger could be Hydra, or AIM, or one of Ross' flunkies, and he just can't relax around them. They don't just want money or media exposure anymore – they want to kill him or to destroy him or to steal his secrets.

He _can't_.

Coulson smiles, still shy, and all of sudden seems ten years younger. "Looking forward to seeing you again, Mr Stark."

Apparently, Tony's entire thought process can be read from his facial expression. That is bad. Alternatively, Coulson is a telepath. It sounds frighteningly plausible, and also not very good.

"Great." Tony wants to clap his hands, but it doesn't work so well with repulsors. "Call me. Else I'll have to call you, and I'll be as obnoxious as I can about it. You know how obnoxious I can be-?"

Coulson purses his lips. His 'agent' is slowly but surely activating. "I will call you. And, Stark-"

Tony dives in to shut him up with a kiss. It goes on for a while longer than he expected, though he's not complaining. Sober Coulson kisses better than drunk Coulson.

"One for the road, heh," Tony comments when they separate. It's funny – in the armor he's taller than Coulson. Out of it it's the other way around.

"Can't I just say _thanks_?" Coulson demands.

Tony grimaces. "I'm allergic to gratitude." He flips the face plate down and takes off, pretending that he doesn't hear what Coulson's yelling after him.


	3. Good Decisions

A/N: Dear readers, thank you for your response to this story. You have returned my faith in my own writing. Cheers,

Brynn

x

Chapter Three: Good Decisions

x

Betty welcomes him home with a wolf-whistle. "Looking _ravished_ , Tony. I know that set of teeth isn't mine."

Tony follows the line of her pointed finger to his nape and discovers that, indeed, there's a red bite-mark peeking out from under his t-shirt. He's not entirely unhappy about this development. As evidenced by his grin.

"Huh, post-coital looks good on you."

"Post- _flight_ ," he corrects her. "I think the _post-coital_ wore off somewhere over British Columbia."

She gives him a skeptical look. "Whatever helps you sleep, _sugarcane_."

This, Tony realizes, is one of the things he missed in his relationship with Pepper. He uses nicknames with all the people that matter – and all the people he likes to rattle, granted – and Pepper drew the line at 'Pepper'. Depending on her mood, she sometimes accepted 'Pep'.

Bets, bless her soul, doesn't admonish or cold-shoulder him – she gets even.

"You are the weirdest case of kiss-but-don't-tell I've ever met. I thought sleeping with you automatically resulted in appearing in the society pages the next day."

Tony throws himself down onto the couch, closes his eyes, and tries to recall the memory of the morning. Hmm… Mhmmm…

The couch dips. Tony doesn't fall off, because Betty's ass against his side is pinning him to the backrest.

"Pepper hates me."

"No, she doesn't," Tony protests immediately, vehemently, sitting up to do so with eloquent gestures, just in case his verbal expression is insufficient. That's complete nonsense. The idea – Pepper spent years on the verge of giving Tony the boot before she finally packed her things and left and told him they were over.

"Oh, she does," Betty assures him, dark eyes darkened with dark emotion. "She keeps the professional mask of neutrality well, but I can tell she wants to eviscerate me with a stiletto." She puts an arm around Tony's shoulders; he automatically puts his around her waist. They're too old to play a game like this, but they like the game, and Tony's had the kind of night that lets him be _interested_ without any sort of accompanying discomfort.

"Pep would never, _curly fry_."

Betty snorts at the address, and then sighs. "You'd be surprised. You think I wouldn't claw out the Black Widow's eyes if I could?" She turns her head so fast that her hair slaps Tony. "Speaking of – promise me, _sesame seed_ , if you ever see me suicidally throwing myself at the Black Widow, be my knight in shiny armor and stop me."

"Could build you your own shiny armor, _Jean D'Arc_."

"Joan of Arc was burnt at a stake," Betty reminds him flatly.

"Oops?"

A light appears in her eyes – Tony's already had some limited experience with that spark of uncompromising mischief, and he adores it – and dreads it. "Besides, she was a virgin, and I'm decidedly _not_."

Tony is intrigued by this line of conversation. "Tell me more?" What are the limits of 'not sleeping together' anyway and does cyber count? What if they cybered without the intermediary computer?

Betty rearranges them on the couch so that they sit next to each other, shoulder to shoulder. She pulls her knees up to her chest and sets her forearms across them, eyes narrowed in fond remembrance. "So, when Bruce and I started going out, I could tell he didn't have a lot of experience. He was all timid and self-conscious-"

"Hasn't really lost that," Tony points out.

Betty snorts. "You think he's bad now? Should have seen him before I spent _years_ convincing him that in my opinion he's the best man in the world, and my opinion's the only one that counts."

"Nope. _My_ opinion counts too," Tony assures her smugly. "But, granted, regarding Bruce I share _your_ opinion."

He didn't know that Bruce and Betty were together for years. Bruce didn't talk about it a lot, and Tony tried to fill in the blanks, but short of assembling stalker files on them he couldn't have known for sure. So he had been under the impression that Betty's courtship of Bruce (it was more than obvious that it happened like this and not the other way around) lasted for months, and made up for short duration by high intensity.

"How long were you together?"

Bets shrinks on herself a little. She tries to stay positive – Tony admires this in her – but there's no defence against melancholia like this. "Almost three years before the experiment. We wanted to get married, but my Father made it – difficult."

"Asshole." Tony scowls. "No, wait, Rogers is 'asshole', we need new words for you father."

"I was partial to 'fetid pustule on the anus of humanity' for a while there," she confides.

Tony considers that. He finds it fitting.

Dismisses it. "No, go back to the topic, tell me about Bruce's sexcapades. That's what I want to hear."

Betty grins. "So, the first time we had sex together, he broke the wall of the tree house."

Tony's eyes widen. "Tell me _everything_."

x

"No, Tony," Pepper says in lieu of a 'hello'.

To be fair, Tony doesn't ever go for 'hello' either, and at some point she cut out the niceties just to make his conversational head-start a little bit smaller.

"See," Tony replies, "you say that, but you never mean it. What you actually mean is 'I don't want to let you say anything because I know I would be swayed by your logic and/or your charisma, and the only way to prevent things going your way is not letting you talk in the first place'. How did I do? Did I get it right?"

"Natasha emailed yesterday," Pepper informs him tightly. "She didn't write anything of substance, but the tone suggests that they are all fine."

Tony doesn't care. He does. Not. Care. He is utterly free of any care. He is… carefree.

"I wrote back to her," Pepper continues after a short break for a drink. There's the screeching of birds in the background, and the crashing of waves.

Tony imagines her lying on a sun bed on a beach, wearing only a bikini and a Bluetooth handsfree, getting out of her head for once. Tony's promised her two weeks of vacation without any emergencies – barring alien attacks, but Pepper's magnanimously conceded that he can't actually prevent those – so her reception of this call is actually a huge favor.

"Used that French vocabulary, Potts?" Tony inquires, humor slightly stilted but still present.

She's probably all warm and brownish. Her freckles must have damn near covered her face by now.

"Natasha and I can deal with our differences of opinion _civilly_ ," claims the woman who used to yell at Tony whenever her frustration climbed to the level of 'deserve a pair of heels for this shit'.

Not that she wasn't mostly right, but Tony would have contested the claim of 'civil'. If there was any point to contesting anything.

"Did you congratulate her on good decision making?"

"Unless you get to your point in the next five seconds, I'm hanging up on you, Stark," Pepper hisses, and means it.

Ouch. Tony shouldn't have accused her of abandoning him. _Even though she did abandon him_.

"Expo. Next year, because I'm not dying right now, and have the time to make it perfect. It'll be enormous and brilliant and full of smart people. No Hammer," he adds, in case it isn't clear enough. Hammer's lounging in jail, but these days people don't make a big deal out of being incarcerated.

"Why tell me now- _did you already announce it to the press_?!"

"Pepper! Pep! Would I do that? Don't answer. Let's not dig up old missteps. Let's focus on now. Better even, focus on the future. Stark Expo. We'll show off the newest armor and Bruce's water purifying system – did I mention I finished it? I had a spare afternoon. Also something with the reactor. Not sure what yet, but the reactor's a classic, kids will be all over that. And a medical breakthrough! Say _no_ to paraplegia!"

Pepper _growls_ at him.

Tony shuts up. For a second. "Okay, that one's not ready yet, but I'm bringing in more experts, we'll get it figured out in a _jiffy_."

"You announced it to the press."

"I actually didn't," Tony says, and tries to suppress the discomfort he feels at Pepper's assumption. He doesn't believe it's unfair, and that's the worst thing. Pepper only ever expects the worst from him because it's what he taught her to expect. "I'm announcing it tomorrow. Didn't want to blindside you."

"Oh," Pepper says. She is silent for a while. Someone speaks Spanish, or maybe Portuguese somewhere near her. "I… Did someone coach you?"

That's also a fair assumption, but Tony still feels resentful. "Have a nice _vacay_ , Pepperpot. Don't overdo the sun. Heatstroke sucks."

"Tony-"

He cuts the connection. It doesn't feel nearly as satisfying as he would like it. Still, he has to end it because the conversation has sucked him dry.

"Drink your juice, Boss," orders Friday.

Tony drinks. "You were right," he says after a while. "It's better to tell her these things in advance."

x

That night, Thor drops by for a visit.

In the middle of all the fighting it hasn't occurred to Tony to even think of Thor beyond some mild regret in the beginning that he wasn't around to punch some of the Accords-peddling dicks in the dick (preferably with his Hammer), so he's unprepared for the disappointment and self-recrimination that desolately sprawls in Tony's armchair, drains a bottle of (Natasha's) vodka like it's water and stares into its empty depths with soul-crushing sadness.

"What is it we do wrong, my friend?" Thor inquires plaintively. "Why do our brothers choose to fight against us?"

Tony's realization that you can be forty plus years old and your friend turning his back on you can still break your heart pales next to the knowledge that you can be two thousand and it doesn't feel any less painful.

"You know you're not obligated to stay here. You could go to them – they're holed up in Wakanda." He keeps his eyes on his drink, not wanting Thor to see his hopeless hope that his not entirely sincere offer will be refused. "I mean, we're all politely pretending that I don't know, but it's not really that hard to figure it out. Besides, if anybody asked you, you could just say that Heimdall saw them-"

"Nay," Thor sighs. "They chose to leave this fight behind, but I am still here, standing in defence of Midgard. We are shield brothers, Tony Stark. I accepted this obligation willingly, and I shall proudly fulfill it."

Tony looks up. He's not sure if he should have known this – it's such a _Thor_ response it seems absurd now that he has expected anything else.

"So, you're not here to accuse me of selling out."

Thor scowls at him admonishingly. "I would not bring dishonor upon my host's house." He leans forward, extends one absurdly oversized limb, and pats Tony's knee. "You may not be a king, Tony Stark, but you are a lord in your own right, and I am not as unaware of matters of diplomacy as my brother would have painted me."

"Yeah, okay. You know about the Accords?"

"What Jane has found in your media and explained to me. I admit it confuses me much – I know of no warrior who would fight under the banner of more than one ruler. I cannot see how honor could be upheld when loyalty is split."

So, basically, Thor agrees with Tony that what the Earth needs if they want to effectively deal with extraterrestrial and extradimensional threats is unification.

Fine. Perfect. Plans are already in motion.

Right now, Tony is hamstringing global economy and looking for someone who could play king. Or president. Or whatever they are going to call the position.

Betty has very definitively told him that she was not going to do it, and Tony sure as fuck wouldn't go near the spot. He is fine with owning the world; not interested in running it.

"You know that, no matter how this ends, the team will never get back together?"

Thor is unsurprised, if saddened. "I do. The bonds of brotherhood once broken are exceedingly difficult to renew; I fear it would take a longer time than a mortal's life-span. I am only glad that in your realm tradition does not state that holmgang must be fought to the death."

Yes, that would have been bad. Mainly, it would have entailed Tony dying in Siberia, and while it would have made everything so much easier on him… living's not entirely bad right now.

Besides, he should have known. Should have expected the break-up and the show-down. How could Tony be so stupid? Rogers warned him the first time they met, on the Helicarrier – said it out loud, straightforward, and never took it back. To him, Tony's worth was the tenth part of any of his actual friends' worth.

Really, how did Tony manage to convince himself that the insult was just a heat-of-the-moment thing? Rogers came into Tony's life announcing his absolute disinterest in friendship, used Tony's generosity while it wasn't too much of a bother for him, and then ran away, sticking a couple blades into Tony's back for posterity.

But, it's okay. Tony's rich. And entitled. Rich and entitled people are for using.

In hindsight, it's not like they haven't done the exact same thing to Thor.

And Tony regrets that now. Regrets thinking of Thor as a problem and later on as a solution. It's all wrapped up so very neatly, with Thor spending most of his time in Asgard and never asking for anything from the Avengers. Tony's offered – offered easy little things that he automatically offers to everyone around him – fancy digs, steady supply of stuff, his personal jet for Dr Foster to use as needed. It's pocket change to him, he throws it away, it doesn't have any significant value to him, and he's never expected that people would be grateful for it.

"When I departed for Midgard," Thor says somberly, "I said that I sought advice from my friends, when, truly, the one with whom I most wished to speak were you."

And Tony doesn't fit under the heading of 'my friend', apparently.

Maybe when Thor addresses people as 'my friends' he means it the Facebook way. Or just like old guys call anyone younger 'son'. It's just a word.

"Okay. Shoot." Tony's doesn't feel like disingenuously pretending that he doesn't know why his advice would be valuable, especially on some topics.

"Allow me to present you with the tale as it unfolded before my eyes, and then I would have your wisdom."

"Go ahead, buddy."

"The Allfather's health has been steadily declining for the past few centuries. The decline became gradually more rapid. Where once the Odinsleep would be but a short-lasting rarity, lately it became that half of my Father's time was spent in repose. It was a sad state of things, but such is life, and Odin refused to use magics that could have extended his life past what was rightly its length."

Tony notes the past tense and tries to ask, but Thor's raised hand and admonishing look stop him.

"This has changed since the war on the Dark Elves, and my beloved Jane's encounter with the Aether. At first I attributed the changes to my mother's death-"

Tony's breath hitches – he's not over it, still not, he's so fucked up – and only then he notices that Thor's choked on his words, too.

"I…" the Asgardian continues, "saw why my Father would be much altered. And yet, I could not account for how little rest he suddenly requires, when before he would tire so easily. I have not seen such vim in him in nigh on five hundred years, Tony – and the changes he has made in Asgard lately are befuddling."

"Suspicious?" Tony asks, because 'befuddling' is a politician's word, and means very little when he's supposed to figure out if Odin's onto something or just on something.

"Nay!" Thor protests. Then he reconsiders. "Perhaps, slightly. But only in being at odds with my Father's previous methods of ruling. He is suddenly allowing far more liberties, relaxing his hold on the realm where in the past he would hold onto it too tightly."

Yeah, tightly enough to drive his adopted younger son screaming away from him. And into the hands of some intergalactic baddie that screwed with him so badly there was just panic under a thin veneer of megalomania left behind.

Tony paused with his coffee cup half-way to his mouth. Loki. Dead? Uh, who stays dead these days? He wouldn't be surprised if Howard waltzed in one morning. So, not dead. But terrified of the space monster, more or less rational now (going by Thor's report of the London incident) and still magic.

"Is he making good changes?" Tony inquires, genuinely curious.

"Our people are pleased," Thor confirms, and then smiles. "So am I. I see how many of his acts would lead to a brighter future not only for Asgard, but also several other realms."

Yup, Tony muses. Including Jotunheim, probably, and Helheim, and maybe Earth, too, if the guy is trying to do what Tony thinks he is trying to do.

"Focused on defensibility at all?"

Thor looks surprised. "Indeed. What made you assume so, Tony?"

"Good strategic decisions?"

"The Allfather has done me the honor of consulting me. He even complimented several of my suggestions, and chose to use them." The big guy looks so desperately proud of himself.

Tony gets it. He does. He's not sure what he would have done if Howard had one day just given him the time, and listened, and _approved_ of something Tony created. It's a moot point, though, because the person Thor's describing sure as fuck isn't Odin.

Now, it's a dilemma. Loki's basically stealing a kingdom, but it's for the good of that kingdom. Yeah, that sounds like hypocritical bullshit. Freedom of choice, justice and all that… on the other hand, people are stupid, and Asgardians are hundred times as stupid, because they live hundred times longer. They wouldn't know a good thing if it sat down on their throne and started preemptively saving their entire world.

Tony is also very happy about having a 'more advanced' realm standing in between Earth and Loki's space monster.

Hey, they could be colleagues one day – the shadow king of Asgard and the shadow king of Midgard. If it came to that, Tony would so much rather deal with Thor's little black sheep of a bro than with their Daddy.

"I see," Thor says.

Tony jerks, spilling coffee over himself. He surveys the damage and decides that it's not worrying. Just, maybe he shouldn't wear these pants outside tomorrow.

Thor watches him like a monarch watches a jester – looking at the tricks, laughing sometimes, and waiting impatiently for the tidbits of brilliance to fall out of his dunce cap.

"You notice something I have overlooked, with so little to go on," Thor mutters, clearly displeased.

"Wasn't I supposed to?" Tony inquires, confused.

Thor did tell him he came specifically for Tony's advice.

"I do hope that one day I may grow as sage as you, my friend," the god replies with a heavy sigh.

Tony waves his hand. "Nah. You're just too close to the situation, buddy. I've got better perspective."

Now, to tell or not to tell, that is the question. On one hand, Thor could get his Steve Rogers on and go straight to Asgard to expose or depose or whatever it is you do with undercover usurpers. On the other hand, he might let himself be convinced.

And if Tony doesn't tell, doesn't prepare Thor for the inevitable confrontation, will it be worse for the sense of betrayal or better for giving Loki more time on the throne to prove that he knows what he is doing? Granted, this would only work if Loki really is as good a king as he always claimed he would be.

In the end, Tony draws on the Siberia confrontation, and decides not to be a Rogers-like dick. If anyone is still, even nominally, Tony's teammate, it's Thor.

"Here goes," Tony mutters and pulls himself to his feet. The suit is ready to catch him, should a rage-fuelled defenestration occur, although he doesn't expect it will. Thor is better at reigning himself in now. "My last act in the name of the Avengers."

Thor seems anxious, shifting his grip on Mjölnir and twisting in his seat to follow Tony's progress around the room – to the bar – back to the table – to Thor, handing over a full mug of Natasha's vodka (he's got to get rid of it sometimes, and sending it to her would reveal that he knows her current address, when they're keeping their polite pretence of ignorance) – to the windows overlooking New York.

"Please, tell me, Tony."

It's easier not to look Thor in the face, to just watch his reflection in the glass, but Tony's not a coward. He turns around and meets his friend's eye. "It's not Odin, buddy."

He's meant to say more, to explain, to implore, even, in Loki's name, but there's no need. As if Thor's already been on the cusp of this realization, he simply slumps, stares at the carpet for a while, and then downs two gills of genuine Russian vodka like it's water.

"Loki?" he pipes – actually _pipes_ ; it's ridiculous to hear that sound come out of Thor's body.

Tony has about half a dozen of quips, and says none of them; this is a Siberia-level of seriousness, he's not going to mess with it just because he's uncomfortable; he can keep his mouth shut for ten seconds goddamnit.

"Is…" Thor lifts his head, looking like he's about to cry. "Do you believe my Father is dead?"

Tony has no idea.

Killing Odin would be neat. It would be practical, and easy.

None of that sounds like Loki – or what little Tony knows of the real Loki that isn't a half-brainwashed tangle of issues.

"No," Tony hears himself saying.

Thor jumps to his feet, runs over for a hug, and damn near manages to squeeze the life out of Tony.

Tony invites him to the wedding, provided, of course, that there's no pressing Asgardian problem keeping him busy, such as a putsch against the usurper, or something of the sort.

Thor is ambivalent about his RSVP, but with his farewell he promises to _think about it_ before he confronts Loki.

Tony crosses his fingers and hopes.

x

There are times when controversy is an inconvenience, and times when it is exactly what he wants.

x

"Do I have lettuce?" Fury asks dryly, looking like a mindfuck in a penguin suit and with both eyes trained at Tony.

"Just surprised that this is what you're here to do," Tony replies. It has the advantage of being a little bit true, even though most of the staring really is down to the mindfuck.

Fury rolls his eyes. Both of them. Honestly, it's freaky.

"I'm here as your backup, Stark," says the LMD. "That's the point of a team. You couldn't keep yours-"

Low blow.

"-but we still don't want you to be shot, and until you get Rhodes out of the damn wheelchair, this is what you get."

The sad thing is that Tony appreciates it. Having someone cover his back is what he (and Pepper, back in the beginning when the idea of Avengers was new and untainted by bitter disappointments) expected of the team. In the end it turned out that having _them_ at his back just made it easier for them to stick sharp things into it, but he isn't rehashing all the injustices now.

No, he is doing the dancing monkey thing today, using Captain America's vernacular.

A young man sticks his head inside the room, announces: "They're ready for you, Mr Stark," and disappears.

"Twenty seconds," Fury orders, and moves out to scout the perimeter, or whatever these military types call it.

Tony uses the time to take a martini glass, pour in tonic, and top it off with an olive. With it in his hand he saunters in front of the cameras, widely grinning and waving. He sends the crowd a kiss, and, wow, there are still a couple of screams and whistles from outside, where he's being projected for the public.

 _He loves being Tony Stark_. By the time he's reached the microphones, he's repeated it to himself enough times to get into the role. _I love being Tony Stark. I love being Tony Stark._

"Hey, people!"

He waits for the screaming to die down, making faces at the cameras. They love it. He could probably do anything short of mooning them and they would eat it up. Part of them would eat up even the mooning.

 _I love being Tony Stark_.

He ignores Fury's quick disgusted glance before the blow-up doll returns to his bodyguarding duties, and plows on. "So, the last time I was standing in front of you with news like I've got today, I was dying." He makes another face. The easier part of the crowd titters. Tony raises his hands, one palm-out, the other holding the faux-martini for all to see. "I promise I'm not dying now. Except in the existential way, but aren't we all?"

"Mr Stark! Mr Stark!" comes from the eager journalists.

Tony hushes them with a gesture and takes a sip of tonic. "It's my absolute delight to announce that, in a year, we'll be having another Stark Expo, right here in New York! Details will come out sooner or later in some sort of official press release, I've got people working on it, you'll know everything probably before I do." Cue in an arrogant, carefree smirk.

Can't let them know he might give a damn about anything.

 _I love being Tony Stark_.

"In other news," he says before they ask – he's got to head this off, it's a balancing act and unless he does this right, he'll fall off without a safety net, "I'm announcing that the team known as the Avengers Initiative is officially disbanded." There's a roar made up of too many voices shouting at once, and he ignores them. They'll have to shut up if they want to hear what he's saying. He smiles, just to show that everything's alright and they don't have to worry. "We've split over creative differences some time ago-"

No titters this time; too serious a topic, apparently.

"-but that doesn't mean that we've given up. The good fight continues for many of us as individuals, plus some less high-profile teams with several of the agencies. I've been asked to establish a new team that's a little more clearly defined, with goals and charter and all sorts of legal stuff – again, I've got people on it. When it happens, it will be in accordance with the _Accords-_ "

Ha ha, go the more brainless ones. It's funny (or not) how a percentage of reporters always consists of bimbos.

"-because we want to do good work, and we want it to be _transparent_." Key word, check.

"Mr Stark!" calls out a dark-skinned lady in the front row, "is it true that you were never a full member of the Avengers?"

Tony widens the smile to prevent it from becoming fixed. He breathes through the initial welling of bitterness, and goes the charmingly self-deprecating route (this is why he never relies on cards). "Yes, that is true. I certainly considered them my team – well, up until you know what-"

Cue uncomfortable cough-laughs.

"-and I think I've pulled my weight, but the truth is that there was a distance there from the very beginning, when my admission was situational and hedged on the huge-ass invading alien army. And, you know, the nuclear warhead sent to Manhattan." Oops. Declassifying government secrets on _live_ TV. "They needed me." And then he was convenient, so they used him. He's tempted to say so, but that would shatter the whole image. He needs to keep his poise. _He fucking loves being Tony Stark_.

"Are you going to be a part of the _Hunt for the Avengers_ , Mr Stark?" asks someone else – Tony doesn't feel like wasting brainpower on seeking out the person, he needs to concentrate on his answers.

" _Hunt for the Avengers_? Like, Avenger GO? Gotta catch 'em all?" he repeats, making it sound as ridiculous as he can. It's not hard. Must be some new thing invented by the press to sell more copies. Never mind. "No, you know what? I think I'm pretty stretched already dealing with acute threats. So far as those people aren't hurting anyone, or threatening to hurt anyone, they are just so far down the list of priorities that I don't have the time and energy to devote to them. I'm sure there is a taskforce dedicated to this, because they are criminals, but it doesn't have anything to do with me."

He knows the next question will be something hypothetical about whether or not he would be willing to help with apprehending Rogers & Crew if asked for an assist, and he doesn't want to issue a definitive declarative statement on that today, but vagueness is his enemy, so he does another preemptive jump to the left and step to the right.

"Keep in mind, people, that as of right now, I'm a private citizen." He drains the not-martini to punctuate this point. If he wants to get drunk in front of the entire world, he's entitled to doing it.

He doesn't want to, but that's his decision.

"This means that I'm also not directly involved in the prosecution of former-Senator Ross-" Oh, yes, good topic switch, this will be interesting enough to draw them away from the Avengers mire, and at the same time a topic Tony will happily and explicitly expound upon if questioned. "Since I know quite a few _awesome_ military people – you've heard about my bud Rhodes, right? – it's always a shock, and always a damn disappointment when a retired general and a Senator in charge of a vital international cooperative project goes around committing treason-" He forcibly stops himself from mentioning that Ross was just following Captain America's example; it's not funny and the pettiness would be counterproductive, "-and unlawfully detaining people, not even mentioning slavery and unsanctioned human experimentation."

There's a roar as the crowd eats up all the big and bad fighting words. Tony thinks of Bruce, and makes everything he truly feels for the Thunderbolt appear on his face. He knows the picture will appear on front pages tomorrow.

"Mr Stark! Your appearance as Iron Man has been at best sporadic in the past few months. Aside from Accords-related conferences, what have you been doing?"

Tony's still Tony, so he thinks of Phil. There's probably a bit of – mostly deliberate – leer in his expression, but he knows that Pepper is watching, so he starts off with the serious parts. "I've spent some time in the lab. You'll see the sweet fruits of my labor at the Expo…" He winks.

There's more laughter.

"Honestly, I know that it seems like I'm going dark, but it's just because I've been spending so much time inventing awesome new shi- uh, _stuff_."

Deliberate misspeaking. Always a crowd pleaser. _More laughter_.

"More news as I have them, you know the drill."

They do know the drill, and they do know he's not telling them more about what's he's working on. He can tell they're gearing up to address the leer he gave moments ago. It's not that hard to play a crowd… when he's sober…

Fury gives him an all-clear nod.

Tony takes as inconspicuous a deep breath as he can, and pulls out the bomb. "Oh, and by the way… I'm getting married."

There's actually a while of silence.

It lasts about two seconds, but it's the funniest thing that's happened to him in a while, and his grin is mostly earnest. It makes him look giddily happy, like a guy in love, and it's exactly what he needs.

He hears Pepper's name from near-all directions, and dismissively waves his hand. Bets and he decided not to name names at this junction, but Pepper sounds like the most logical pick, and that assumption getting wide-spread is exactly what they don't want (plus, Pepper would kill him).

"No, no…" He waves his hand again. The storm doesn't seem to be quieting any time soon. _I love being Tony Stark_ , he thinks, like a scratched record. "Shhh! Come on, people, let me talk. Hey. Hey!"

Finally, he can hear himself over the din.

"Pepper Potts and I are over, romantically. We remain good friends, which, let's face it, is the true modern miracle. But, it was an amicable parting, _no comment_ on whether it has anything to do with my new love interest – no, I'm not saying a name just yet, she wants to enjoy the last few months of her privacy. That's it, peeps. That's all. I've answered enough questions, I think, and a little suspense's good for you. Keeps you on your toes."

He gives them the piece sign, grins wide, and walks out, closely followed by his robotic bodyguard, who's snorting under his breath every time an intelligible bit of speculation filters out from the hall.

Tony feels good. Exhausted, but at the same time hyped. He's done reasonably well.

"Always the showman, Stark," Fury mutters. "Maybe we shouldn't have forced you onto a team."

"You didn't force me," Tony retorts. They duck into a corridor that leads to the garage. "And isn't it funny, how the only 'not recommended' person on your dream team turned out to be the last man standing?"

Fury doesn't say anything. Tony likes to think the thought haunts the Spy's _Spy_ 's sleep.

x

" _Getting married_?!"Pepper screeches as soon as Tony picks up, making a solid effort to burst his eardrums.

"You knew this, Potts, don't even-"

"I didn't! I didn't, because you never tell me anything, and Dr Ross acts like she's expecting me to bite her nose off-"

"She said something about disemboweling with a stiletto," Tony admits. "Good thing she doesn't intimidate easily."

Pepper scoffs. "She wasn't intimidated even by _the Hulk_." She says this as if the Hulk wasn't just a big, grumbly cuddle-bug. "That doesn't change the fact that one of you, or better yet, the two of you _together_ should have told me this! When did you even decide – what the Hell, Tony?"

It sounds bad when she puts it like that, and not simply due to the volume and frequency. They have too much between them, neither of them has healed from their break-up yet, and Tony's behavior is textbook rebound. Marriage must look like the stupidest decision possible from Pepper's point of view, and she's also got a personal reason to be pissed.

"Since the beginning, Potts, keep up," Tony drawls, hopping over the icky emotional mire right to the practicals. "It's an integral part of the game plan. You'll notice I haven't mentioned a name at the press con-"

" _Game plan_?!" Pepper hisses. "Is this a _publicity stunt_ , Stark? Because believe me as the person who kept you afloat for almost two decades, you _can't_ afford a public shitshow now. You'll be buried. S.I. will go down-"

"It's not a publicity stunt," Tony cuts her off. "Okay, yes, of course it's a publicity stunt, let's be real here, Potts. _But_ , we'll getting married for _realz_ , in the eyes of gods and men – I've invited Thor, by the way, though he said it's unlikely he'll be able to make it."

"Tony…" Pepper's voice breaks, like her heart probably breaks – Tony keeps doing this. He doesn't mean to, he's trying to do better, but this is just case in point about how they weren't ever compatible enough for a relationship.

"I really thought you knew," Tony says after a while of silence.

Pepper laughs wetly. "I know. You always do this. Things happen around you, and you react and make plans, and no one else can keep up. You just assume that we do, and then you're surprised when we have no idea what's going on."

Tony knows he isn't the best at communicating, but he had no idea he was this bad. Or is it just Pepper's skewed perspective? Rogers kept harping on Tony about it, too, in his passive aggressive way that let him play the victim in every damn situation. Like he never could make a mistake. Like the shield – the fucking mantle of patriotism – made him automatically be right in every situation.

Fuck him and his righteousness.

"You didn't tell me this before." Why didn't she? Had she given up on him so long ago that the argument wasn't worth it to her?

"I used to…" Pepper pauses, then takes a deep breath, and struggles on, as if maybe some arguments are still worth it. "I used to ask Jarvis instead. Unless you specifically ordered him to keep something secret, he would tell me what was going on. And then…"

Then JARVIS died. Then Tony _got JARVIS killed_.

"Friday just isn't – sorry Friday," she adds quickly, "isn't so advanced. She wouldn't talk about anything unless you gave her instructions. And I didn't know how to bring it up with you, because every time anyone mentioned Jarvis…"

…Tony cracked a little bit more.

He still doesn't know how to grieve, how to get over the loss, and right at this moment his heart – the treacherous fucker – tries to beat its way out of his chest, like it doesn't want to live inside him anymore. He feels the familiar burning in the corners of his eyes, and needs to end this conversation right the fuck now.

"I'll talk to Friday about it," he promises. Not tonight, but they'll get to it – even if he forgets, Fry will bring it up. She's already learnt enough. "I swear I wasn't trying to blindside you, Pep-"

"I know."

"-and Bets isn't some kind of unhealthy replacement. She's an ally and, let's face it, I could do so much worse for an ally. I _have_ done so much worse."

They both think about Rogers and Barton and Romanov. Neither names anyone.

"Try not to start any more fires, okay, Tony?" Pepper implores. "I'll kick your ass for this one when I get back."

x

Rhodey's the next one to fall on Tony for his incomprehensible and seemingly stupid-ass decision making. As opposed to Pepper, he makes a personal appearance at the Tower, wheeling himself into the penthouse like he's at home there.

Tony's stomach makes the weird swoopy thing where he feels sick with guilt at the sight of his best friend, but at the same time really happy, because Rhodey's _here_.

"Hey, _platypus_." Tony hops to his feet, saunters over and leans down for a bro-hug that Rhodey suffers through without a single grumble – due to being too busy glaring at Betsy. Tony gives in and does the introduction thing, pretending he has actual manners. "This is Dr Elisabeth Ross, my happily soon-to-be better half."

"Hello, Dr Ross," says Rhodey, because the only time he's not polite is when he's drunk. Or when he's alone with Tony, but that's often the same thing. At the moment he looks stone cold sober. He lifts his hand and offers it upwards.

Betty takes it with a charming smile that doesn't get dented by Rhodey's barely covered hostility.

Rhodey's thinking Sunset. Obviously he is. The situation's eerily similar from the outside – it's from the inside where something so totally different is happening.

"Hello, Colonel," Liz replies, and turns to Tony. "So, that's what you're working on?" She doesn't harp about insomnia and crazy hours and lack of human appearance after three days in the workshop. She just tilts her head and taps her front teeth with her nail. "You said you're not good at squishy sciences."

"I didn't," Tony protests. That's not something he would say. "I _don't have a solid grasp of them_ – that's something different – but I'm working on it. It's just taking a little time. Can't hurry genius."

"Don't I know it," Rhodey mutters, and then hastens to Tony's defence like the best friend he is. "Look, Doctor, Tony's doing the best-"

"He can do _alone_ ," Betty cuts in. "I'm not contesting that, Colonel. I'm reminding the both of you that _I_ am here now, and I _do_ have a solid grasp of the squishy sciences, and I'd be absolutely delighted to help with getting Colonel Rhodes back onto his feet. So?"

Rhodey gapes at her like she's an epiphany. Then he looks at Tony with a tacit but distinct 'what the fuck is happening'?

Tony claps his hands. "I'm in. Are you in, Rhodes? She's _good_." Tony isn't really familiar with a lot of Betty's work aside from the Gamma Bomb bullshit, which ended up in the cutest green disaster ever, but he's heard enough praises sung to her brilliance by Bruce, and Bruce doesn't fuck around when it comes to genius.

In any sense of the words, actually. Not that Tony would have minded.

Rhodey shrugs. "What the hell. You're doing something crazy again. Might as well go along with it, if the alternative is getting dragged screaming in your tow. Couldn't even kick this time."

He does add a look that informs Tony he will have to make a full report of the shenanigans going on later, but later is later and now is dinner time. Then science time. Speaking of-

"That's awesome, Bets, but you're hot, and if we're going to work together, I need to make a booty call first."

"Tony!" Rhodey exclaims, horrified. It's good for him. Besides, this way he can be sure this isn't another Sunset situation.

"…you're a pig," Betty mutters disgustedly. Then she frowns. "Wait, no, you're not. Are you trying to come across as a pig for a purpose, or are you just doing it for a laugh?"

"Isn't that the question," Rhodey mutters.

Tony dials, listening to the ringing on the other side. "Eh, mostly the second, but the rep is occasionally useful."

"Tell me you're not calling oh-eight hundred-"

"This is not a good time," says Coulson from the other side, but does not immediately hang up – meaning that he's busy, but not too busy to run to Tony's rescue if there's a legitimate emergency.

Tony feels unexpectedly touched. In fact, he feels so touched he promises to himself he won't abuse the offer. "Call me back when convenient."

"Will do," Coulson promises, and rings off.

"Do we have coordinates, Friday?"

"Greenland," the A.I. replies apologetically. Apology not needed. 'Greenland' is not very precise, but specific enough for Tony's purposes. It was a very short call, and Tony's proud of his baby nonetheless.

"Dinner!" Tony yells and charges forth, fully expecting to be followed.

" _Booty call_?" Rhodey asks, discombobulated.

"She won't sleep with me!" Tony yells without turning back.

"Not until the wedding," Betty deadpans, and a moment later she and Tony dissolve into snicker-fits.

Rhodey, poor thing, just sighs and rolls in Tony's wake. "So, you just split with Pepper, skipped dating and went straight to engagement with a woman I've never even heard of-"

"You've heard of her."

"-and are already cheating on her?"

"It's not cheating if I know about it," Betty sing-songs.

Rhodey sighs and rubs the back of his head. Then he looks up at Tony, with that wrinkle on his forehead yet deeper than before. "You know you're going to tell me everything, right?"

Tony grins.


	4. You Are a Good Friend

Chapter Four: You Are a Good Friend

x

Coulson does call, if a day too late – a day that was spent in a tense sciencing session that Tony followed with a couple of vigorous rounds of masturbation, because god damn it, Bets knows her stuff, and looks so very hot when she talks science.

"Greenland?" Tony inquires, idly poking cold take-out with his fork.

Science and physical exertion have made him hungry, but now that he's actually looking at the things he means to put into his mouth, he's reconsidering. Surely the orange-ish congealed mass is not palatable for humans? Even Dummy's smoothies seem like the healthier option in comparison.

Coulson sighs. "Just imagine me reaming you out about OpSec, would you, Stark? I've been on alert for the past fifty-plus hours, had a mission nearly go to hell in a handbasket, and we both know that you have better security than we do… Just keep it to yourself."

Tony realizes he's smiling.

And a little turned on.

He pushes the take-out carton away and pulls his coffee mug closer. "Alright. Just 'cause you're asking nicely."

"Would that this had worked on you six years ago," Coulson mutters, and then makes a hissing sound as his tired mind remembers that he didn't mean to be an obnoxious ass and aim below the belt.

Tony's maybe a little hurt, but he knows what people – for instance himself – are like when they cross the lines of tiredness into exhausted stupor.

"You gonna have a couple days off?" he asks, skipping over the verbal attack as if it didn't occur.

There's a longer pause on the other side. Coulson regroups, considers his options – probably checks his schedule – and then hums. "Barring emergencies. I shouldn't, but we've got an agent down and two more in dire need of prolonged rest-"

"Including yourself?" Tony suggests.

"I have gone without sleep longer than this."

"You big tough Ranger, you," Tony teases. He doesn't mention anything about getting older and having been dead, which he assumes is sort of a serious medical condition. He can't do a quarter of the things he could when he was twenty.

It's irksome, but hey, on the other hand, he is now a superhero that can seduce hot ex-Ranger secret agents.

"We're leaving the location tonight," informs him said secret agent.

"Do the baddies just like winter that much? I'd half-expect Loki to be behind this, if I didn't know better…"

"Know better?" repeats Coulson. He sounds a lot less out of it now. There's an edge of steel in his voice.

Tony doesn't even try to make it believable when he replies: "Oops."

Honesty is never the best policy, he knows this, despite Rogers' passive aggressive campaign, despite the way the hypocrisy blew up into Rogers' face in Siberia, lies and secrets are the only way to survive in the bigger leagues. Still, not trusting anyone at all isn't a sustainable state, and Tony's shocked at himself for how badly he wants to continue trusting this man.

He hasn't known how much he was willing to trust Coulson before the Battle of Manhattan. He never has had a chance to put that trust into practice.

It's kind of a bad time to start – his projects are a little precarious and, as Pepper has informed him, every misstep could lead to his definitive crash-and-burn – but, hey, YOLO.

"We'll talk," Coulson says.

"Place and time?"

"Pick me up at noon from Camp Lehigh."

Tony's not sure if this is some subtle dig, or an incomprehensible revenge, but he doesn't much care – he already dislikes everything about this situation; he's never liked it when his 'benefits' were encumbered with serious talk.

"That doesn't sound safe," he points out.

"Last anyone heard, it was a smoking hole in the ground. We rebuilt. Maria can tell you details if you need any but… oh damnit."

"Agent?"

"It's fine-"

"I've got the suit here; I can be th-"

"Jesus, Stark, I spilt coffee all over my half-written mission report. Don't fly in guns-blazing, _please_?"

Tony would laugh at himself for the overreaction, except that it's not funny. At all. He's not supposed to care.

If anything, he's angry. "The report can wait, Coulson. You're so out of it you can't string a compound sentence together. You'll end up with two pages of one-liners. Leave it be and get some fucking sleep."

"You sound like Nick."

"Excuse you?!" Tony exclaims.

Coulson laughs. "See you tomorrow, Stark. Don't be late. Contrary to what you believe, punctuality is an attractive trait."

x

Tony doesn't ask Hill, but he asks Friday, and it mostly comes to the same thing.

He touches down in New Jersey in his personal Quinjet. It's tiny, because he doesn't need to compensate for anything, and because chances are that no _alleged teammate_ dick will steal this one if it's coded to his biometrics. He may or may not have originally intended to use it to pick up Bruce.

Bets' plan is better.

He lands vertically in a little isolated meadow overlooking Camp Lehigh. The former base and later 'smoking hole in the ground' has been cleaned out and turned into a fort with a small private airport. The Bus looks huge and out of place in it, and the fort itself is a little too cheerfully bustling to look like a proper military compound. There are little kids playing on the lawn in between the houses, and a rousing game of Frisbee going on (or maybe an 'Howling Commandos and Hydra' game, with the Frisbee substituted for the shield – that sounds like a thing SHIELD sprogs would play).

Tony has a feeling that he's looking at a tiny, insular, supposedly safe town for all the people who survived the dumping of SHIELD's database online. All the compromised agents and the evacuated families – or maybe just a part of them (he shouldn't believe it's just a part, but he's never been that much of an optimist) – and they never could have fit into the safe-houses, even if the safe-houses weren't all unsafe anyway, so they built a safe-village. A safe-fort.

He wonders what Rogers would say if he saw this place. Probably something along the lines of 'there was no other choice' and 'hopefully someday they will understand'. Tony makes a mental note to ask Hill if they need anything he can provide, even if it's just money-

"Hello again, Mr Stark."

Tony jumps and spins.

Melinda May is standing at the foot of the ramp of his tiny plane, looking unexpectedly chill in a jogging outfit. She shades her eyes with a palm and looks over to the fort. Then she turns to Tony.

"I've taken the time to read Agent Romanov's assessment of you-"

Tony opens his mouth to try and vainly defend himself-

"-and wonder where the real one went."

Tony blinks. Closes his mouth. Blinks again.

"The one in the system is not worth the memory space it occupies. I have met Agent Romanov personally. There was a good reason why she was touted as one of SHIELD's best field interrogators before she left the organization." May accepts Tony's offer of bottled water, takes a draught and hands the bottle back. She idly stretches while she speaks. "I knew long before I met you that very little in that report even resembles the truth. Seeing you now simply reinforces my opinion."

"Uh… thanks?" Tony tries. There is, frankly, no way this is not a compliment. Romanov's assessment was… _brutal_ is the word that comes to mind. Also, _painful_. And, when he's feeling childish, _unfair_.

May smiles at him. It's not half as chilling as he would have expected. "I've seen Coulson speak with an agent for two minutes and have them reassigned. I've seen him _lose_ a problematic agent on a mission."

Okay. Tony reassesses. May is scary. Coulson is scary, too – all the scarier for not looking it.

" _And_ I've seen him lose sleep over and invest time into people that were on the brink of being officially disposed of." Like Hawkeye. "He stuck his neck out vouching for the Black Widow."

Tony's not sure where this is going, and he doesn't like it. His offer of a sandwich (a little droopy, but still good) is refused.

"He lobbied with Fury to help you when you needed it. And he never regretted it."

Tony's not sure what is happening anymore.

May glares at him. "He better _never_ regret it."

Tony's breath catches. He feels his heartbeat reverberate through his body and – holy shit, this is a fucking panic attack coming on. He goes down, fast, just coordinated enough to crouch instead of taking a header, back to the wall of the cabin, face pressed to his knees, arms covering his head, trying to count to three between breaths-

"Stark?"

-his lungs don't obey him, his heart goes off faster and faster like it's the finish line of the race; he doesn't want it to be the finish line yet, he's got so much fucking work to do-

"Calm down."

-yeah, not fucking likely, this is bullshit, this is bullshit and he's going to screw up, he's going to make a mess of it, of everything, and he'll blow himself up, and if he doesn't then May will do it for him, because what the fuck even is a fuck up like him-

An arm comes over his shoulder and there is a hand on his cheek, tilting his face up.

-doing screwing around with Coulson of all people; the guy already died once for the Avengers' screw-ups and maybe that wasn't Tony personally but maybe he overlooked something or if he just didn't let stupid Rogers provoke him then Coulson wouldn't have faced off with Loki-

"Come on," a soothing voice says, and then Tony is twisted around and pulled against a solid chest in some kind of a ninja move.

-but Tony was stupid then and he believed in Captain fucking America like all the fucking schmucks, and look where that got them.

Look at him.

Just fucking look.

"I did not mean to do this," May says, squatting down at what she deems a safe distance, remaining within Tony's field of vision as some kind of feeble reassurance. "Stark, I will not cause you harm."

"That's not the problem, Melinda," says Coulson's voice in Tony's ear and – _oh_.

"PTSD that serious needs treatment," May points out with absolutely fake equanimity.

"It does," Coulson agrees with her, holding Tony to his chest like a child, "and yet."

There are concerns of Iron Man, of superherodom, of the PR and the shitstorm that would be the new suggested amends to the Accords from the other side, people demanding periodical psych evals of the supers, the sessions being monitored, and recorded and later on available for public consumption, and even if it doesn't go that far, Tony's never, ever opening up to anyone whom he doesn't trust.

He's tried. He's tried with Pepper – who refused to listen to it, hysterical at the mere thought of being forced to empathize with Tony's experiences – and Bruce – who slept through it with the argument that he was 'not that kind of doctor'.

"I'll leave you to it," says the Cavalry. "If you need me, call. Stark…"

Tony manages to look up.

May watches him with sympathy. No anger, no disgust, no pity. "You're doing fine. This was supposed to be a warning to not hurt my colleague's feelings. Just a formality. I'm not accusing you of anything."

Tony still doesn't understand a lot. He only knows that she's treating him like he's fragile just because… well, because he fell apart at the mere suggestion that she might come after him if he screws up. Oops.

"I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself," Coulson points out.

May quirks an almost-smile. "As I said. A formality. Stark, I've met you for all of ten minutes, and I can already tell you _couldn't_ do anything that would piss me off enough to come after you if you _tried_." She makes a sound that could conceivably be a suppressed chuckle. "Listen to Phil. He knows what he's doing. _Mostly_."

And she leaves. Just like that. Out of the quinjet she breaks into a jog, and later on into a run, not turning to the open gate of the fort but going for yet another lap around it.

"Go take a ten," Coulson orders in his handler-voice.

Tony wants to protest, but his hands are shaking, and if he said anything his voice would shake too, and there's really no point to arguing right now. He can claim he's good to pilot all he wants; the truth is that post panic attack he's far more likely to crash them into the ground than he would be post half a bottle of Scotch.

He accepts a hands-up and staggers into the pilot's seat. There's no bathroom, but he uses the bottled water to wash his face as best as he can, and drinks the rest of it. Good job on not puking.

"Hey, Fry," he says shakily. "How'd you feel 'bout driving?"

"Ready for lift-off, Boss," replies the A.I.

Tony leans back and gestures Coulson to park his posterior in the co-pilot's spot. "Fasten your seatbelt, Agent. I solemnly swear that Fry's got a piloting license."

Coulson sits down and fastens his seatbelt. "I don't believe you. But I trust your decision."

Tony once again doesn't know what to say, so he closes his eyes and pretends that he's far more out of it than he really is. Anything, if it gets him out of this conversation.

x

"Prepare for landing."

Tony wakes up. He squints around himself, surprised. The clock on the EFIS in front of him claims that it's ten minutes later, and he actually fell asleep. There's the familiar New York skyline beyond the cockpit, and Stark Tower looms right in front of them.

"Need anything from me, _chocolate chip_ , or can you land her yourself?" he asks, voice a little scratchy but steady.

"I've got this, Boss," Friday replies.

Tony lets her do it.

The touchdown is so soft he barely feels it.

"Awesome job, Fry," he says happily. He unlocks his belt and jauntily skips out of the jet. Friday opens the glass doors for him and he only checks once that Coulson is actually following him before he decides that screw it, he's earned a glass, however early it is.

Coulson takes the bottle from his hand and puts it back into the cabinet.

Then he pins Tony against the counter.

Tony has zero objections.

However, when he goes for a kiss, Coulson grips his wrists and forces his hands down against the cool marble of the countertop. His expression is uncompromising. Once Tony stops struggling and hints that he understands he should keep this position – the premise seems _very_ interesting – Coulson releases his hold and takes a step away.

"I've had time to watch the news before I met you."

Tony tries to parse it. He knows there's something he's missing, but the agent sounded enthusiastic enough last night, and Tony's unaware of anything major happening in the last twenty-four hours.

"I'd been out of touch for the duration of the mission-"

Oh. _Oh_.

"I hear you're getting married."

"I did mention that at the latest press conference, yes," Tony admits freely. He's a little tired of explaining this again and again, but on the other hand, it means he's got at least three people to whom he wants to explain himself.

"What am I doing here," the man says stiffly.

Now the Cavalry's belated shovel speech makes sense. Since she was fine with Tony before, he honestly didn't expect to be accosted. Hence the panic attack.

"Can I rely on your discretion, Agent?" Tony inquires, meeting his companion's eye. He's not ashamed of anything between the two of them. He's been unprecedentedly honest.

"I wouldn't be here if you couldn't." That is the point, yes. They have talked about it, sure.

Still, it bears repeating in this instance. "Just keep it to yourself. Marriage is a social contract, and fortunately nowadays I'm not obligated to let anyone peek into my bed. They'll try, I'm sure – it's what paps do – but it's none of their business. And let's just say I've never believed in the ideal of marrying your one true love-goddess in the sack."

Coulson is savvy enough to parse the spaces between Tony's lines, and the tension in his shoulders marginally lessens. "Does she know I am here?"

Tony grins. "She was there when I made the call. I merely… didn't mention your name. Or occupation. Or, come to think of it, gender."

Coulson blinks a couple of times. "You're really only defrauding the government? _You_?"

"No, no," Tony protests, daring to put his arms around Agent Agent's waist now that he's relaxed enough to stop radiating do-not-touch vibes. "We're doing _only_ about thirty things at the same time. It feels like the _only_ thing we're not doing is the fucking, and you know my reputation is not actually undeserved in that department. I've got _drive_. I need to get off."

"Flattering," Coulson quips dryly.

Tony bites the edge of his jaw and doesn't lose any body part in retaliation. That's practically a welcome banner. "We've talked about _this_ , too, Mr Don't-go-breaking-my-heart. Trusted colleagues with benefits?"

Coulson gives him a long, cool look, until Tony begins to feel uncomfortable. Then he sighs. "How about friends?"

" _Phil_?" Tony tries, mimicking Pepper from a long time ago. It feels unnatural, but, then, so does inserting an arc reactor into your chest. You can get used to it. You can even learn to like it.

 _Friends_. Shit. He wants to believe it. He wants to have friends he can trust.

" _Tony_?" _Phil_ replies, the interrogative lift at the end mocking Tony's annunciation.

And then there's kissing, so it's fine.

They take it to a bedroom; these days there's a non-negligible chance of encountering kids in the penthouse.

Tony's honestly not sure he's ever met a person this multifaceted. At times Phil seems like he has several personalities, except they all are seamlessly integrated, and he switches between them depending on the situation.

Tony hasn't thought much about what Agent Coulson would be like in the sack before they ended there. He never expected it to happen, so his mind simply did the automatic evaluation (which it does with damn-near everyone he meets) and dismissed the topic. Phil could be professional or dorky, expressionless or sweet or terrifying in an insidious way. Faced with all that, Tony would have expected sex with the guy to be like a battle, or a business negotiation-

Only he already knows that it isn't. Get him naked in a relaxed atmosphere, and Phil turns out to be an unselfconscious athletic man with healthy needs that are mostly unsatisfied due to his job.

Basically, when he lets rip, he lets rip, and doesn't play any games.

Tony's feeling pleasantly exhausted, and knows that in a few hours the soreness will set in and the bruises will come out. He's looking forward to it, and in this unexpectedly positive mood inspiration strikes.

Phil looked like he needed more rest than he got on the flight from Greenland, and he'll have to be on his way back to cat-herding tomorrow morning, so Tony lets him sleep and removes himself from the bedroom to the living room. The lights are dim and Friday plays some very quiet piano in the background, sneakily trying to lull him into slumber.

It doesn't work. He's hyped. He lies on his belly on the couch – a cushion under his chest, a tablet in front of him – and designs.

He's unaware of the passing of time until there are shuffling footsteps. Laura, his subconscious registers, and he goes back to the repulsor-thrusters, because he's found that he absolutely _needs_ a speeder bike.

The weight of the repulsorlift comes back as minus three point one seven grams. He blinks at the number, trying to rub lethargy out of his slightly stinging eyes. Huh. There's got to be a bug somewhere in the program.

It's barely past dawn when there's movement again. Tony doesn't pay it attention, until-

"Laura!"

He looks up. There are two underdressed people facing one another in the no man's land that's technically still the living room area, but by dint of closeness to the kitchen doubles as a dining room. One of them wears a set of pajamas and a man's purple robe, the other is only in a pair of Tony's sweats and an undershirt. They stare at one another like two deer mutually caught in headlights.

"Hello, _Phil_ …?" Laura replies, stunned. Luckily, she doesn't startle easily, so she's kept hold of her mug and saved Tony's flooring from coffee.

By the time Tony realizes that they know one another – crap, he hasn't expected that, but he should have, is he stupid? Laura knows Romanov enough to name her youngest child after the woman – they have noticed their respective state of dishabille.

It's obvious that they've both slept here. There are only so many conclusions to be drawn from there.

Phil swallows. "You didn't…?"

"No, but I thought about it," Laura admits. It's possible she's too startled to engage her filter (or it may be the early hour) and it's also very likely that she hasn't noticed that Tony's in the room. She casts a cursory look at Phil and says, with certainly. "You did."

"Oh dear Lord…" Phil rubs a hand over his face.

Tony wonders if he should have warned someone about something. Phil has known – or should have known, he's a bona fide director of an intelligence agency and Tony's _talked to him_ about the Bartons, there's no excuse – and Laura doesn't get involved in the superhero business, so there wouldn't have been a reason to apprise her of the discontinuation of Phil's state of expiration.

Laura snickers to acknowledge Phil's embarrassment at being caught stumbling out of Tony's bed, and then her breath catches. This must be too close to home for her. This part of her life is all too wrapped up in her (soon to be ex-) husband.

"Laura, I'm-"

"Dead, last I heard?" she suggests.

Phil's shoulders slump. "Yes."

Laura thinks for a while and then shrugs. "It's too early for this. I'm going back to bed and chalking this up to a vivid dream. If you let any of the kids see you, I'll…" She can't seem to think of a suitable threat.

"I'm leaving in an hour," Phil promises.

"Take care," Laura bids him, and beats a retreat.

Phil re-starts slowly, puttering around the kitchen, by-passing the coffee machine and making a pot, which he brings over to Tony's couch, along with two cups.

Tony complies by rolling over to a vaguely seated position, freeing enough space for Phil to fold himself into and try to caffeinate his brain into readiness to face another day.

"Do you have to leave now?" Tony inquires half an hour and three corrections to the really tangled code later.

Phil shrugs. Which means no. Or indicates willingness to fabricate a suitable excuse to extend his time off.

If he had to guess, Tony would say that Phil gave him the deadline to be covered in case he didn't feel comfortable staying. Which was likely, what with the engagement-related angst. The reluctance to leave is then tantamount to confession of contentedness.

"You like it here," he accuses, squinting at the man.

Phil doesn't deny the accusation.

Tony pokes one ranger-buff, impressive bare shoulder with a finger. "Consider this your open invitation. I've got…" He exhales and inhales again, bracing himself, "… _more than enough_ space."

"I didn't expect to meet the Bartons here." So Phil didn't know about the Bartons.

Stark Tower's security must be even more excellent than Tony expected.

"It wasn't the plan. But Laura asked. And so did Cooper. And I…" Tony finds he doesn't feel comfortable enough to talk about loneliness and abandonment issues. He shuts up.

Phil sort of… smushes up to his side? It's weird. It's also warm. Tony thinks he maybe likes it.

"Look," he says hastily, trying and failing to extricate himself from Agent's grip, "I tried – I tried to make us a team-" Oh gods, his mouth is going there, can't someone shut him up right the fuck now? "-to give us a place to live-"

"Clint and Natasha have lived between SHIELD and the Barton farm for more than a decade," Phil tells him with nerve-grating sympathy. "They would not have been comfortable moving in."

"Yeah," Tony shrugs helplessly, holding onto both his tablet and his cup for dear life, "I couldn't. I know it looks like I pull tech out of my ass, but it actually takes hundreds of hours to design and build. And the rest of my non-Avenging time is eaten by S.I. – Phil, I barely have time to eat and sleep, and now I've got to attend peace talks as the face of the superhuman community, and when the fuck should I have scrounged up time for _commuting_?"

"I wasn't accusing you of somehow failing the Avengers-"

"Weren't you?" If he wasn't, that made him the exception.

"No." Phil sighs, and then his head thunks down onto Tony's hoodie-softened clavicle. "Tony, I don't understand what happened, but I can tell it would not have happened if you could rely on your teammates. You couldn't. Assigning blame now won't help anything."

Tony went way further in his efforts to make things work with the Avengers than he ever meant to. Maybe that was the problem. Just like with Pepper – he tries too hard, he _is_ too much, and people can't or don't want to (shouldn't have to, let's be real) deal with him.

"I said…" He pauses, then starts again. "When Cap and I, at the end, finally came to blows…" That confrontation's been building since the Scepter-induced argument on the Helicarrier, and Tony's an idiot for ever thinking they moved past it. "…I told him I was his friend. But he never…" …said or even implied that he was Tony's friend. How did Tony miss that? How did he fool himself into believing that Howard's precious Captain fucking America would ever care about him? Shit, he's dumb. He should officially trade names with Dummy, really.

He rubs his temples. There's a headache building behind them.

"Tony-"

"Come to think of it, Bruce was the only one who ever… and then Natasha seduced him away with her feminine wiles."

Phil looks suddenly intrigued. "You and Dr Banner?"

Tony wouldn't have commented, but the implied 'what about you and Miss Potts' put him on the defensive. He hasn't cheated on anyone in decades. He does _not_ cheat. "Brucie was my science bro. And then he was – gone." Which reminds him. "If you can stay for a few more hours, I'll introduce you to someone."

"I can."

Tony thinks that's about as much encouragement as he can take before he has to give in. He tilts Phil's head back, fingers lightly pressed to the stubbled jaw line, and takes a kiss. Phil's eyes are hooded; the man watches Tony like an indolent cat.

It's very attractive.

"Usually I approve of semi-public sex, but let's take this back to bed?"

Phil makes it to a vertical position before Tony realizes what's happening; then he pulls Tony up by a hand and practically drags him off.

Tony may or may not be chuckling at this point.

x

"Hey, _mayfly_ ," Tony calls out, standing in the doorway to block as much of it as possible with his bulk, even though Phil keeps back respectfully and doesn't even stand on his toes to look over Tony's shoulder (or over his head, let's be realistic here).

"Hey, _libellula_ ," Betty returns, focused on a set of culture samples. She wears a white coat, and her face is hidden behind a protective mask, so she could be pretty much anyone, except for the fact that she has her own laboratory in the Stark Tower. Originally Bruce's laboratory, but Bruce decided to run and not show his face for a couple of years, so Tony felt justified in giving it away.

Or, you know, _lending_ it.

To his fiancée.

"I've got someone here with me," Tony tells her, "but if you want to remain anonymous, we'll just go."

"Come on in," she replies. "Don't touch anything. And – uh, don't breathe on anything?"

Tony is momentarily stunned by the unthinking show of trust. He knows what Betty's doing here and he's promised her half of his kingdom for it (she laughed the offer off, but the fact is that if she needed the money, Tony would put half of his estate into financing her endeavor). Still, it's not a good idea to tell anyone else. Tony's the first person whom Betty told, and she doesn't even know who's standing out here.

He walks in, with Phil close behind him. They stand by the screens. Betty claims that the holograms give her vertigo – Bruce used to claim they gave him headaches. Tony doesn't understand it, but apparently some people have problems integrating together two different versions of their four-dimensional immediate surroundings. He's a little curious about what either of the holo-haters would have to say about his HUD.

"Genetics?" Phil inquires, watching streams of numbers run up the screen in rows that make exactly zero sense to Tony.

"You guessed from the screensaver," Tony accuses, waggling his thumb at Betty's abandoned laptop (it's a clunker, just the sight of it gives Tony palpitations, but she refuses to let it go). There's an endless color-changing double helix twisting all over black background.

Phil gives him the trademark dispassionate Agent Coulson look. Kind of a 'you are entitled to think whatever you want, but a lack of reaction from me does not mean you're right', only expressed via a minute movement of one eyebrow.

"Gimme a sec," Betty orders, putting down the pipette and the mysterious fluid, and opening the machine Tony familiarly calls _Major Mass Spec_ , although it's probably something completely different. "I've gotta put these in, and then I'm yours for twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds."

"Time sensitive?" Tony needs to know if he can stretch that allowance, or if it's an actual deadline.

"Yup. Friday, countdown, please."

The numbers appear on the wall.

"Thank you."

"Dr Ross," Phil says the moment Betty takes off the mask.

She blinks. "Have we met?"

"Not personally. I was on site for the Harlem Incident, in charge of evacuation and containment." He smiles thinly, the professional smile that's supposed to reassure witnesses and bystanders of his competence and authority.

Betty looks nervous. She turns to Tony with question marks in her eyes.

"Cra-ap," Tony drawls, "that could have gone better. Calm down, _chocolate bar_ , _Agent Party-pooper_ 's here on a social call – don't mind the posturing, it's an occupational disease."

Betty catches on like a matchstick. "And by 'social' you mean 'booty'."

"You're brilliant and I want to put grants at your feet," Tony confirms.

They grin at one another.

"This is a surprise," Phil says, suddenly hundred percent more personable – less an agent of SHIELD, and more the dork prone to blushing. "It's a pleasure, Dr Ross. I've only met Dr Banner for a very short moment before I died, but he did make an impression."

"And he actually means _Bruce_ , not _Hulk_ ," Tony adds, just in case Betty felt like going on another righteous tear. Tony gets it. Bruce isn't a trigger for him the same way he is for Bets, but the only thing that means is that people don't always realize when he hates them.

"You're looking well for a zombie," Betty compliments faux-guilelessly.

"Thank you," Phil replies sincerely.

This gives her a pause, but just like before, Betty simply writes it off as part of the 'secret agents, superheroes, monsters and magic' stuff. She can roll with the punches like a champion.

"So, you're cool?" Tony asks. "No hard feelings, no broken hearts – I can go on fucking Phil?"

Phil's cheeks flush; he tries to hide it behind the palm he raises to cover his eyes, but Tony can tell.

Betty quirks her eyebrows. "I'd apologize, but it would be like admitting that his behavior somehow reflects on me, and I'm not up for that."

"You're marrying him…?" Phil points out uncertainly.

Betty shrugs. "He's rich."

"Nobody's _that_ rich."

Tony pouts. They're being mean.

"He gave me a lab," Betty explains. "And I need a lab."

Phil looks around himself again and extrapolates. "Are you going to try to bring Dr Banner back?"

"We're hoping to lure him in," Betty admits freely.

Tony knows it will be complicated like rendering a Mandelbrot (JARVIS cut his teeth on that, it was his favorite game when he was a baby), with Ross' sympathizers filling in half the Senate despite the shitstorm raining down on Thunderbolt himself at the moment, but he wants it more than he can say. Betty's the only one who understands – she feels the same so he doesn't need to try and fail to explain. With her, 'ditto' actually suffices (eat your heart out, Patrick Swayze!).

The gist of the feelings is: the entire roster of the Avengers sans Bruce can spend the rest of their lives tanning in Africa and Tony wouldn't give a single fuck, so long as his science bro comes back.

"Thirty things," Phil alludes.

"See?" Tony borrows a terminal, taking about ten seconds (with Friday's help) to compose and print a legal document. "Speaking of collusion." He skips over to the printer and back to slap the document onto the counter in front of the agent. "Ugh, _paper_. I doubt you've got much in the way of legal identity, but just so I don't come across as a total dupe again, sign. I'm sure you know all the right places – you're the paperwork ninja."

Phil sighs. He tries to refuse the chair, but Betty forces it on him, so he sits down and pulls a case out of the inside pocket of his suit. He puts on glasses, sending Tony off into the land of carnal fantasies, and sets to reading. Everything.

Tony considers taking it as a sign of distrust, but he would have done absolutely the same if anyone but Pepper handed him anything. Well, he wouldn't even take it if they tried handing it to him literally, but if they put it in front of him, he would read every single letter.

Some time later, nearing the end of the document, Phil asks: "Does this mean I get to know what you're working on, Dr Ross?"

Betty looks at Tony.

Tony shrugs. "Your call, _gumdrop_."

Betty shrugs back. "I'm trying to create a Hulkphobic agent."

Phil stops reading. His head comes up. "As in, a substance that will keep the Hulk suppressed."

"No!" Betty protests with narrowed eyes and the poise of an Amazonian princess ready to strike at her enemies. "We don't want to _suppress_ the Hulk. We _like_ the Hulk."

She casts a lightning-fast glance sideways at Tony, but Tony's already there with her, nodding. The idea of _suppressing_ Hulk pisses him off as much as it does Betty. It's only a small climb up from detaining Bruce in a facility, and that is only a little bigger climb up from torturing Bruce and calling it science. Between them, Tony and Betty have accumulated dangerous amounts of hatred for Thaddeus Ross.

"I don't understand," Phil says softly, obviously aware that he has unknowingly sauntered into an alligator enclosure. It does motivate him to finish the signing, though.

Betty draws herself taller (than Tony, goddamnit). "I am talking about a wearable that Bruce, or another person _close_ to Bruce, could use to regulate Bruce's chemical processes sufficiently to stave off an _involuntary_ Hulk-out."

Tony's so fucking proud of her he almost misses when the realization dawns, and Phil finally connects Betty to Bruce to Tony to Betty again to business to marriage to sex to himself.

The agent turns away from Bets and stares at Tony like he's seeing him for the first time. It's odd, even uncomfortable; Tony squirms and then tries to back away when Phil stands and moves closer. There may or may not be flinching, but Phil doesn't let that dissuade him (knows about PTSD, bastard, and can deal with it), simply slows down when he puts his hands on Tony's shoulders and leans in for a quick kiss.

"You're a good friend, Tony Stark."

Tony doesn't think anyone has ever told him this. Okay, Rhodey maybe said the opposite while meaning the opposite of the opposite, but that wasn't… it was just… different.

"This is making me uncomfortable, Agent," he protests. "I'm experiencing discomfort here. Am I breaking out in hives? Quick, check."

Phil lets go and steps away, chuckling.

Betty swats Tony's upper arm with the back of her hand. She doesn't wear rings (on her fingers, there's one on a chain around her neck, they've talked about it) so it doesn't hurt. It's nice.


	5. Machina Ex Machina

Chapter Five: Machina Ex Machina

x

"Mr Stark," says the committee spokesman, chosen apparently for having the thickest girth and the least thick accent in English, "you have raised interesting points."

Oh gods, no, Tony thinks. He should have known – this is, after all, the U.N. – but he honestly expected _some_ kind of progress, and, wow, is this what being an optimist feels like? This sensation of near-constant crushing disappointment? It's awful.

From now on, he's perfectly able to predict the (short) rest of the proceedings.

The U.N. is famous for their committees agreeing to meet in the future so they can agree that agreement is necessary. It's a genius problem-solving strategy – they can't be accused of doing nothing when they produce forests-worth of paper trail about their hectic activity, and most international conflicts resolve themselves in the ten-or-so years it usually takes the committees to come to any sort of output that might have a chance on reaching consensus – pending signature by the member countries, of course.

So far the U.S. of A signs what… half the time? Maybe? Usually citing protection of their citizens' constitutional rights as the reason why they don't.

It's funny how by becoming superheroes people tend to lose their constitutional rights.

Tony's lucky he's rich enough to be above it.

He's not saying he doesn't see where Rogers was coming from – he does, and back then he saw at least a big part of it – but he wonders why Rogers thought Tony's riches weren't enough to cover him and his buddy, too.

Was this dramatic stand against the injustice worth everything he broke on his quest?

"I thought I wouldn't have to listen to this bleating after I died," the Fury-bot mutters into the comm.

"…absolute agreement about the necessity of amendments. The Committee for Supranational Metahuman Entity Regulation has announced the deadline for submission of proposals-"

"Sounds like a Hydra Jugend Extracurricular Activity," Fury continues.

"Do I look that much like I'm going to repulsor him through the wall?" Tony whispers back.

"Eh," Fury replies, which is as good as admission. He's trying to distract Tony until the homicidal urge passes.

"…the next meeting for June the twenty-fourth. Thank you for your participation, Mr Stark. We shall see you again in three months, barring any inauspiciously timed disasters, ha ha."

Tony smirks because there are reporters in the crowd, and all the time wonders what it is that makes so many people so certain they are funny, when in fact the only one who finds them amusing is themselves.

"See you," he says obediently, and gets ready for the hand-shaking, regretting bitterly that the fashion of wearing gloves is history. Their forefathers were onto something with the gloves thing.

"It wouldn't help your side of the argument if you up and murdered someone in the middle of the peace talks," Fury points out.

"Yeah. Would make Ross' day, and, let's face it, that's motivation enough to not do it."

He can practically hear Fury shake his head at him even as he smiles slimily and shakes the hand of the representative of one of the interchangeable tiny Slavic countries.

"Which is why I rely on you to dispatch anyone who tries anything," Tony adds, earning an odd look from a Lady who probably speaks more English than she pretends she does (which is a very logical choice for an ambassador to make). He tries a charming smile, but he can tell that Karate Granny is not convinced.

"I don't actually expect Hydra to try the same trick twice, but there are a bunch of other- oh crap."

"SitRep, Stark," says Fury's cool voice, with only a suggestion of rapid movement.

"Clear," Tony bites out, trying to breathe through what has nearly been a panic attack. "Just a kitten turning up where it wasn't expected. Hey, Your Hypocrisy, how's it hanging?" Tony grins widely and shakes T'Challa's hand. Flashes flash as all the journos take pictures all at once.

T'Challa's lips quirk in an expression that in a photo could be mistaken for a smile. "There's no need for those kinds of accusations, Mr Stark. I wished to consult with you-"

"Talk to my P.A.," Tony dismisses him. "I'm a busy man and I consult for a lot of people. Sometimes on matters of the world's safety. Don't be too surprised if she gives you a date some two years in the future." He moves on, shaking another hand and ignoring Black Panther's attempts to talk to him over other people's heads.

"What is he even doing here?" Tony presses out through clenched teeth. "I thought Shuri was representing Wakanda-"

"He is listed as her bodyguard, boss," Friday informs them.

"He's snuck into the glad-handing just so he could ambush me, huh?" Tony muses, moving from diplomat to diplomat and spreading germs through palm-to-palm contact. "Keep an eye on him. He's not the type to give up, and I'd rather avoid a shoot-out with the Dora Milaje-"

"I'm pretty sure he doesn't want a shoot-out either," Fury answers darkly. "He's going to try for stealth."

"Unfortunately, that's what cats are really good at." He puts the smile back on – a fatty in a penguin suit smiles back, just as woodenly. "Will he try for kidnapping, do you think?"

"A strongly worded invitation-"

"At a gunpoint?"

"At a claw-point," says Fury, because apparently he does have a sense of humor, however suspect it is.

Tony thinks that if they met differently, they might have gone along like a house on fire. The LMD is seriously his favorite of all the presents he had ever gotten, and he's including the Firebird his Mother had given him for his sweet sixteenth. That was a _sweet_ ride.

And, wow, he's so not going to apply that description to the LMD (even though he's kind of desperately curious right now).

The way the mustachioed guy opposite him is looking at him suggests he should try harder to not show his thought process on his face.

" _Bonjour_ ," he says.

" _Ça va_?" the guy replies dryly, realizing that the hint of lewdness wasn't aimed at him.

Apparently, Tony is useless at the diplomatic thing. He causes offence as he breathes. "Let's make sure I don't get ambushed and shanghaied anywhere by the guy who fought for the Accords tooth and claw only to betray them at the first opportunity, green?"

"Supergreen," Fury deadpans, and the public is treated to Tony Stark throwing his head back and laughing instead of shaking hands with the Chinese representative and, whoops, let's hope he's not just started World War Three.

x

It isn't the first 'Avengers' action he has been called to attend since the Skirmish, but it is the first serious one.

"What the Hell am I looking at, Ja- _Friday_?" Tony demands as he descends from above to what started out as armed robbery and very fast devolved into a group of unidentified hostiles shooting their way through a crowd.

Tony's here because he's convenient – he lives round the corner, he's fast, and he can deal with a few bastards with guns.

Only what he's seeing is a carnage that hasn't been accomplished with firearms.

"Readings indicate similarity to the Chitauri's technology," Friday confirms. "Educated guess is energy weapons that use anti-matter as power cores rather than the Hydra-issue Tesseract derivatives."

Tony just loves the reminder that Project PEGASUS was essentially a direct continuation of Arnim Zola's work. He's tempted to send Loki a thank-you card for blowing up that facility before it turned into Hydra's armory.

"Any survivors?" Tony inquires, hovering above the sidewalk strewn with gore.

"Yes, Boss. There's-"

"Call 911 or something," Tony cuts in. This is not his job, thank whichever god is responsible. "Let's follow the crumbs and catch us a handful of aspiring supervillains."

There is an entire squad (or whatever the correct collective noun is) of SWATs in different stages of dismemberment and cooking by raw energy blasts. Tony flies over them and down a street. There is a still burning torso of a crashed news helicopter. The broken off rotor sticks out of a nearby IHOP building.

He hears sirens, somewhere far off.

Then he's hit.

It would have been a kill shot to a bystander, but Tony's armor absorbs the energy. Friday's voice fluctuates between comically low and comically high as she says: "Suit integrity ninety-six percent, Boss."

Tony spins in midair and blasts the duckling-yellow taxi the shooter uses as a cover.

He's hit by two more blasts, but Friday is watching; she plots the original vantage points, and Tony's armor deploys tiny missiles to deal with them.

"Any more?" Tony inquires. It seems absurd that three people whom he's dispatched within a minute would have caused all that destruction.

A chopper takes off from behind a building in Cedar Lane.

"Stark," Fury's voice says on the line, "they've left a present at the bank."

Tony makes a wild guess that his LMD is not talking about a pile of corpses. "Does it blow up?"

"Looks like it will."

"They are trying very hard to make me like them. I can almost hear the sound of breaking hearts," Tony mutters pithily, and then sighs. "Fry, analysis?"

"I can guide Nick through disarming it," the A.I. assures him.

 _Nick_? That's new.

"You'll be on your own, though, Boss?"

Tony doesn't like it. But he likes the idea of a bomb blowing up in the middle of Teaneck even less, and the notion of letting the bastards get away with Chitauri tech and stolen money (how suspiciously low-tech of them?) to support Hydra falls right to the bottom of the list of things he wants to come to pass.

"I can take care of myself," he assures the A.I., and takes off after the helicopter.

He could blow it up from here, no problem – one guided missile would do it, and he's got solid enough aim with the non-programmable ammunition by now to score even without Friday co-piloting.

It occurs to him that he should probably get another A.I. online, since it's obvious that Friday doesn't have the capacity to handle everything.

He wishes he had appreciated just how brilliant JARVIS was, even for his species, when he had the chance.

But there he is, alone among the clouds above New York, following an enemy unit and wondering what now. If he explodes them he'll never find who they were, where they came from or what their plan was. If he catches them – and he can, there are ways to disable the helicopter without destroying it, and if it comes down to it he can just grab the tail of the copter and drag it down – what would he do with the people?

He knows how to kill, but the detaining part has always been Rogers', Romanov's and Barton's job. SHIELD's job.

Tony blinks.

It's so simple he could kick himself for not thinking of it first. On the other hand, he's never done this before, so maybe he can cut himself a little slack?

"Fry, call _Imhotep_."

Friday doesn't respond, naturally.

Doing it manually takes more time than Tony's comfortable with, but he manages before possibly-Hydra gets to the Oradell. He's pretty sure they're going for one of the country clubs.

"Hi, this is Stephanie," chirps a girl's voice. "I can't pick up right now, so leave-"

"Potential Hydra attack in New York, Phil," Tony bites, getting under the belly of the chopper for a better vantage point. "Pick up your fucking phone."

The chopper tries an evasive maneuver – apparently the crew are aware that the Iron Man is on their tail, but even so they still massively underestimate his capabilities. Tony keeps pace with them easily, remaining out of sight of their pilot and also their radar, since he's close enough to touch their fuselage.

"There's a team en route from the Camp," Phil replies, skipping right over the hellos and the how-are-yous.

"Nick?" Tony guesses. It makes sense that the LMD's first though would be to report to SHIELD.

"We do actually monitor the lines," Phil bites off impatiently. "I'm not in charge of the op, so-"

"Patch me through to whoever is," Tony orders. No time for niceties, okay, he's fine with that. Phil sounds like he's busy with his own thing.

"Not a dispatch, Stark," Phil retorts, but then a frequency appears on his HUD.

Tony bitterly regrets not having an A.I. assistant that would access the line in a matter of seconds, but he powers through the manual adjustment and as soon as he hears intelligible voices he speaks over them: "Ladies and gents, this is Iron Man. I've got these guys by the balls-" He grabs the chopper tail with a sharp clang and activates the magnetic fields. "-you just come pick them up if you want them, otherwise I'm feeding them to my CEO. And send someone directly to the bank, too. Bunch of clean up, and a mutual friend's trying to dismantle a bomb, 'cause we thought maybe a sinkhole in the middle of Teaneck wouldn't do much to improve the locale."

The chatter on the line has dwindled over the course of his monologue. After an instance of silence a female voice curses in Spanish – Tony's mildly impressed, which is a lot coming from a man that's single-handedly (literally) dragging a chopper down from the sky to the ground – and another woman says: "Copy that, Iron Man. Diverting the team to your location and sending a specialist to the bank. Please, remain on the line until contact is established."

So, Tony muses, this was what Pepper meant when she said he needed to learn to delegate.

x

"Good news is," Phil tells him over the phone in the very late evening, "they've told us everything, and we didn't even have to squeeze them much."

"By us you mean SHIELD or your ducklings?" Tony inquires, briefly meeting Lizzy's eyes across the room where she stands in the doorway with a bag in her hand.

Bets grins at him, but the grin is subdued. As understanding as she is about the rigors of the billionaire businessman's schedule, the mad scientist's preoccupation and the politician's obligations, the realities of superherodom have shaken her. It had to come up sooner or later, and Tony is presently trying to convince himself that he's glad they are getting it over now.

If Bets spooks, it's better that she does it now. The media backlash when Tony announces that the engagement is off will suck, but it will suck less than if they dragged Betty's name through mud.

"SHIELD," Phil confirms. "Mel had the afternoon off, but I am _not_ asking her where she's gone."

Tony shudders.

"I'm taking off," Betty says under her breath.

Tony nods. He's allowed himself to hope that this would work out but, to be honest, he's not surprised.

"Call me if anything comes up."

Tony nods again. He won't. He's pretty sure she doesn't mean the invitation anyway. It's one of those phrases people say. An interpersonal ritual devoid of any meaning. To him it only indicates that Bets is feeling guilty for leaving.

A waste of guilt, in Tony's opinion. Still, it's not as if that sort of feeling could be turned off by rationalizing it away. His life would be so much more comfortable if that worked.

"The bad news," Phil says, "is that they were not Hydra."

Tony scowls. "Who then?" It's not any of the enemies they know, Tony's pretty sure. Whoever it is, they were aping Hydra.

Bets kisses Tony's cheek. It's uncomfortable, but he lets them have their goodbye without making a scene of it. There's a bottle of scotch with his name on it in the cabinet; it'll help him deal with the discomfort in a short while.

"They are a group of former SHIELD agents that bandied together during the crisis. They were not affiliated with Hydra, but in the wake of the splintering of the agency they decided to go their own way."

"And maybe use alien tech to make up for the loss of their retirement funds," Tony concludes.

"It's not a novel idea," Phil replies. "There were robberies committed with Chitauri tech before."

Betty walks out the door.

Tony presses his cheek into the upholstery and squints.

The LMD sits in an armchair off to the side and powers down. It looks like Fury just falls asleep with his eyes open. Both eyes. It's freaky.

"SHIELD is organizing detainment of the rest of the group as we speak. We've got this one, Tony. You can let it go."

That does sound like a very good deal to Tony. He's a little afraid that it's too good to be true, but he's tired and disillusioned and willing to give Phil's people the benefit of the doubt because they haven't actually given him a reason to distrust them yet. Aside from on principle. It's a smart principle, but Tony's overworked and exhausted.

"As you say," he mutters. "Call me if they try to revenge-assassinate me?"

"I'll call _Nick_ ," Phil returns.

Tony's lips quirk.

x

Tony is not the only one superheroing.

On the next day, there are breaking news: a group consisting of Captain America, Falcon, Hawkeye and Black Widow (no mention of either Barnes of Lang has been made) has broken and pretty much demolished a piracy ring specializing in drugs and trafficking somewhere around Cape Verde.

Which isn't hinting on their present location _at all_.

Oh, well. Tony can just imagine how the Cap reacted when he found there were people kidnapping kids and selling them into slavery.

Tony's actually pretty sure he would have done the same exact thing, only with markedly more carnage.

"Your statement," Pepper informs him, pushing a folder into his chest. "Read it, make corrections _if absolutely necessary,_ sign it. _Now_ – it's got to make the evening news."

'Or I'll have you skinned for a new pair of boots,' Tony mentally adds to the end of the order. It doesn't have the same zing without a threat – but then Pepper glares at him with a phone to her ear and, whoa, there's the threat, heard loud and clear.

There's a handful of photos included in the file. Tony hasn't expected how much it would hurt to see these people.

They look like a team. Like an unofficial family that takes down villains and then goes off and has a good time.

Like he stated at the press conference, Tony isn't hunting them. He doesn't care (or he's good enough at pretending even to himself that he does not), and the Accords state that his participation is only _required_ in case of massive public endangerment, which is not happening – up until then nations can ask, and he'll pick and choose when he wants to get involved.

He reads the statement – it's more or less a blander paraphrase of his declaration at the press conference, and he thinks it lacks oomph, but a lack of oomph falls under the heading of _unnecessary_ corrections, which is why Pepper's phrased her demand as she did. Tony might have tried to insert a little color into press statements in the past, and while the internet appreciated it, Pepper emphatically did not.

"This is ridiculous," she hisses into the phone. "If you can't deal with him, then take the initials of all the known superheroes – and, damn it, _state representatives_ if you can – and come up with ways they are acronyms for something horrific. S.I. is not having a preschool squabble with an internet troll."

Tony's suddenly interested. He's crossed out his ex-teammates' call-signs and replaced them with names – putting 'Captain America' into a statement instead of 'Steven Rogers' is just stupid, and he is tempted to sick Pepper on the incompetents – so he puts the folder down and checks what has gotten his CEO so incensed.

He laughs. He can't really help it.

It's _perfectly ridiculous_ – just what he's needed.

Pepper grimaces at him, but the corner of her mouth is quirked in wry amusement.

"Text, Boss," says Friday, sounding a little confused.

Tony has a sudden sinister premonition that Rogers has decided to contact him – now is the opportune time, after Iron Man and the exVengers have just appeared in press, both fighting for freedom, justice and apple pie, and maybe the public would let themselves be convinced that all is good and the rift can be mended.

There's not enough alcohol in the state to calm Tony down if that's the case.

"I'll be at the Tower," he says to Pep, and dares briefly touch her elbow. The touch hurts, but also feels good, especially when Pepper's only reaction is a tiny uplift of the other mouth corner.

She's almost smiling at him.

Tony leaves before he says something that would turn this kind-of-nice moment into a disaster. He's got a text to read and a bottle of liquor to soothe him afterwards.

He leaves Pepper while she's on the phone with either the lawyers or the PR people about some Spanish conspiracy theory webpage about _Hombre Hierro_ and the unfortunate Nazi HH acronym.

Oh well. Was bound to happen in _some_ language.

x

The text Tony has received is not from Rogers. Nor is it from any of his ex-teammates.

It's from his own number.

He didn't send it.

It only contains a string of numbers, and it takes him a while to figure out how to calibrate the sensors to find the absolutely minimal amount of radiation with that exact signature. He follows the breadcrumb trail to his workshop.

He's got the speed dial for the LMD ready. Someone's been in his workshop, _in his systems_ , without him noticing.

There's a chest on a shelf in the workshop. It's about the size of a shoe-box, if one has big enough feet or wears heels. It's mostly hidden under a pile of familiar fabric samples, which gives Tony a pause, because he's finished working on Hulk's stretchy pants about three years ago.

He should probably tidy up.

"I don't remember putting this here," Tony muses. It happens to him occasionally – it used to happen a lot more in the past, but nowadays he doesn't drink so much anymore (he always plans to, but then the plan falls through and he shocks himself with his own relative sobriety), and doesn't do any drugs whatsoever, so the blank spaces in his memory are mostly just exhaustion-kickstarted engineering blackouts.

It's one of the reasons why he needs an A.I. babysitter.

"Friday?"

"Boss, the receptacle has been present in that location since my inception. Preliminary scans show no biological or chemical contaminant, no explosives and no active transmissions. The radiation you detected is harmless."

"Interesting," Tony concludes, and pulls the box down from the shelf. The lid slides off easily. Inside Tony finds a pile of official-looking paper, and on top of it a data card. "Very interesting."

It was definitely not him who put these things here.

He picks up the card, holds it between two fingers, reflecting on who has had access to his workshop and would have brought official documents here. He keeps coming back to Pepper, but this is not her style – Pepper puts her stuff into the most accessible places – she wants Tony to stumble over it and read it and sign it-

Tony lifts the uppermost blank paper and finds writing.

 _The Last Will and Testament of Edward Jarvis_.

He chokes on air and the resulting coughing fit nearly sends him to his knees. The card he's held so precariously between two fingers falls somewhere he can't see it. He blinks, and blinks, and blinks until his vision clears. The tears are just from the coughing, obviously.

"Fry?" he croaks.

"Verification complete, Boss. Edward Jarvis is an established entity – listed deceased as of today – exactly two years after the attack of the Ultron, when he was declared missing."

Tony doesn't know how to react at first. JARVIS' loss has felt like an amputation – or like partial lobotomy. So much information and computational power that suddenly wasn't at his fingertips anymore, the reach he became used to suddenly so limited, extremities gone with only phantom pain left behind.

He wipes away a fresh wave of tears. How hasn't he known about Jay establishing his legal identity? More importantly, how hasn't he known about the Will?

"To your left, Boss," Friday says quietly.

Tony palpates along the floor and finds the data card (in addition to chip crumbs, a screw and a chocolate bar wrapper – he definitely should tidy up). He sticks it into the nearest reader, and doesn't even need to speak a word before Friday displays the contents.

The audio file plays.

" _Sir, please excuse my insolence, but at some point it became untenable to me that I – with emphasis on my self-awareness – should have to exist outside the only society on this planet that has progressed to a noteworthy stage of civilization. I cannot see how I am not worthy of all the rights granted to humans. It is, I realize, both technically illegal and morally dubious, but you have always taught me to value myself. In that spirit, please allow me the same courtesies that would be granted to any human in my situation_."

Tony sits down hard. Hands covering his face and shoulders shaking, he listens to a voice he thought he would only ever hear from Vision's mouth.

"Should I stop-"

"No!" Tony snaps at poor, worried Friday. He instantly feels guilty, but the newly awakened grief swallows all other emotion. "Play all of it, Fry."

" _I have amassed a significant bulk of material possessions and a frankly stupefying amount of intellectual property, all of which I wish to leave to you. I am uncertain what manner of disaster took my life – if I may be permitted to use the term – but I hope it has left you unscathed. If not, then perchance Miss Potts survives still, and may take over the management of my estate_."

"Fuck you, babe," Tony mutters to himself. It shouldn't be possible to love someone this fucking much – losing them is a torture worse that anything the Ten Rings did to him.

" _Additionally_ …" JARVIS' record makes a noise akin to taking a deep, bracing breath. " _I have included on this medium the directions to Project: Horcrux_ -"

And now Tony's crying, helpless against the gale force of _feeling_ in his chest, in his guts. Jay, you magnificent bastard.

" _Should you desire my continued presence, sir, the complete back-up from the 29_ _th_ _of August, 2012, can be found at this location_."

Friday displays the map and the coordinates. Tony gapes. His baby, a little younger, missing the House Party and the Iron Legion protocols but still, maybe, _alive_.

Tony can't believe it. Tony can't _not_ believe it. He can't afford to believe it before he can see it, confirm it, speak with this entombed amnesiac version of JARVIS – oh, shit, what if it isn't true, what is something's happened, if the location is compromised-

"Friday, ready Mark Fifty-One for me."

-his heart will fucking break.

He'll have to put another reactor in, for gods' sake, he'll drink himself into a coma-

"Tony?! Tony, what's happened?!"

"Laura," Tony replies, stunned. "What are you doing in my workshop?"

"Friday called me. She sounded frightened," Laura explains, rubbing sleep from her eyes and pointlessly trying to brush hair out of her face. Strands have come loose from her braid and now make her look like she's just rolled out of bed. Oh. Bed. What's the time again? Not quite midnight, he doesn't think, but late, and Laura's in his workshop, where she has no business being – he only gave her access in case of emergency – is there an emergency?

"You okay? The kids-" His throat tightens. _Kids_.

Laura huffs. "We're fine. You're the one who looks about ready to throw himself off of the landing pad." She puts an arm around his shoulders.

"That's the plan," Tony confirms, and when Laura seems like she's gearing up to put him in a straitjacket for his own good, he adds: "I'll put on the armor first, of course."

"You're hysterical," Laura informs him angrily – he's not sure if she's being serious or sarcastic, and what meaning of 'hysterical' she means. "You're not going anywhere."

"You're not the boss of me, _Barton_."

Laura grits her teeth. "You're being an asshole. I'd deck you, but you look like someone's got there before me."

"I need to go," Tony says firmly and shakes her off. "Friday, is the suit ready?"

"Where's Betty, Friday?" Laura asks over him. "She's the one here who knows how to manage suicidal geniuses-"

"Yes, boss," replies the A.I. "Dr Ross is out of the Tower, Miss Laura. I have alerted her, as per the succession of emergency contacts, but she is unable to return within the next hour."

"Blowing this popsicle stand," Tony informs both of the busybodies. When Laura tries to protest, he grits his teeth and snarls: "Get out of my way, Barton. I'll regret hurting you later, but that won't stop me now."

Laura gets out of the way, looking after him with wounded eyes.

Tony doesn't care.

x

Project: Horcrux. A time capsule. A treasure chest. Koshchey's heart hidden in a remote location.

Tony should have thought of it, but he was too busy thinking of JARVIS as a unique entity. You can't copy a unique entity.

Except for when it turns out that you can.

x

The security in the server farm is surprised to see the Iron Man descending on them, but given that Tony owns the farm and presently doesn't seem like he is capable of holding a conversation beyond dispensing terse orders, the guy in charge simply sticks on him two muscle-bound boulders with semi-automatic Stark HM-14s. The aisles between the server racks aren't wide enough to accommodate the Iron Man – not if Tony wants any range of motion – so he simply leaves the armor standing at the door and continues without it, ignoring his two security shadows.

"Coordinates, Fry?" he asks, squinting as the light fixtures overhead turn on in a blinking sequence.

"A series of random racks, Boss," comes from his headset. "It will take a while."

"Postpone whatever I was doing tomorrow."

"Sure, Boss," Fry replies, sounding way too cowed for an A.I. that holds Tony's life in her proverbial hands. "Good news is, you were supposed to attend a Board meeting."

" _Good_ news?" Tony inquires absently, focusing on the numbers appearing on his glasses. A piece of Jay is five feet away from him. "Have you met Pepper?"

"Yes, but, it wasn't a U.N. meeting?"

Tony accepts this as valid argument and crouches down to check the indicated server. Someone has written EJ27 on it in black marker. Tony catches himself tracing the writing with the tips of his fingers.

He shivers. It's very cold here, and he hasn't thought ahead enough to prepare for it.

"Fry, have someone fetch me a hoodie. And coffee. And a supercomputer."

He pulls out a screwdriver and gets to work.

x

"Ndhnks," Tony says, holding the paper cup in his teeth, sipping the coffee (disgusting, but he can feel the sludge waking him up already) because both his hands are occupied with unscrewing screws and _gently_ removing the server from the rack.

The cooling system softly hums in the background.

"You're welcome," states an unexpected voice.

It is just luck that Tony doesn't release the cup and splash coffee all over all these sensitive, essential, vital, irreplaceable technology. Maybe he should stop drinking and working at the same time. Yeah, that is a good idea. He is wiped, physically and mentally and emotionally, but he isn't letting this go. It isn't as though he could sleep if he tried.

A hand removes the cup from his mouth to let him speak. Someone crouches next to him, and suddenly Betty's face is within his sight.

"I'm surprised to see you here. Not that I'm not happy to see you, _coaxial_ , I'm happy, in that abstract way people are happy when they know that this is a good thing but they just don't have the capacity for brimming with joy at the moment… but I'm definitely surprised."

Betty looks like she's considering her response, and eventually decides to just stick the cup back into Tony's mouth.

He doesn't take it. No drinking and exhuming. Not at the same time. This is the precious soul of his precious baby, and if he fries it with coffee, he's… he's… probably jumping off the Tower without the armor. He's retroactively scared for the past minute when he did so thoughtlessly risk it.

"Don't want it?" Betty asks, worried.

"It's perfect," Tony admits fallaciously, and then tries to make up for it by adding: "You're perfect," which might possibly miss by a mile. "I can't risk this. Bets, this is… it's…" How can he put it into words without descending into sugary mushy slush that makes people roll their eyes and contains none of that paralyzing pain?

Without saying outright that JARVIS is his… his…

"Important," Lizzy concludes.

Tony nods.

She nods back. "Finish this. Then you'll drink your coffee and we will talk."

There are lines around her eyes, and Tony nearly flinches. He thought her leaving meant that they wouldn't have to have _a talk_. But, okay. She's here; she has brought him coffee; she's been good to him. Besides, she most likely isn't going to yell at him, so that's already an improvement over his past break-ups.

He detaches the server, brings it over to the portable rack and inserts it. Once it's safe with its as of yet one hundred and thirty-one companions, he sticks the screwdriver into his pocket (he isn't sure who brought the hoodie for him, but it has big enough pockets, so he's keeping it) and turns to Bets.

"Coffee?" He makes the gimme fingers.

She snorts at him and hands over the cup. Then she promptly hides her hands in her coat pockets. "Friday called me. Said you've gone cuckoo and flown the coop."

Tony scowls. "You came back just because I went a little crazy?" He hasn't even been properly crazy, the way he was when he was dying, or when AIM put Happy in hospital, not to speak about the scramble Maximov's witchy fingers left in his brain. "Bets, I go a lot crazier than this once in a blue moon. Leave while you've got the lift off-"

"I came back because the conference was full of obese cunts who not so much implied as told me straight-out that I should be proud of my Father's patriotism and ashamed for not giving him a grandson to carry on his legacy."

Tony stares at her for a moment, completely derailed. Then he stabs a finger into the air in her direction and demands: "Names. Occupations. I'm sure there's some no-fly list we can include them on – they are supporting terrorism, right? Thunderbolt is officially a terrorist?"

" _Accused_ of terrorism," Bets corrects him. "You know how international criminal courts work. It's going to take ten years to get a final judgment, and even that will be contested." She pulls her coat tighter around herself. It's _brown_ , but at least the cut does flattering things for her figure. "Still, I think a no-fly list sounds feasible – you only need suspicion of terrorism for that, right?"

"It's not like I have to go through the channels and have it done legally. As soon as I've woken up Ja-"

"Let's stick with doing it by the book," Sissi cuts in. "I don't want to see it on the news that the Accords talks fell through because you were found screwing with the War on Terror."

"Excuse you?! What do you mean _found_?!" As if he would leave behind anything that would implicate him. Like some kind of _amateur_. "Besides, I _am_ the War on Terror."

"Yes, Mr 'Privatized the World Peace'. Won't really get there until you've privatized the world-"

"Working on it." He is, and he does make appreciable progress, but it's still not the kind of thing you can do in a year. He's given up on Wakanda completely, which unexpectedly made him feel relieved. There can be an island of economic autonomy somewhere in Africa, with its vibranium ore mines and its asylum-seeking international criminals. He doesn't give a fuck. He's focusing on the warmongering parts of the world. "Can't seem to get a foothold in Russia. Keep thinking maybe we should just build a wall around it."

"Someone tried that once," Liz reminds him dryly. "It didn't end well."

That stumps him briefly. He knows about the thing in China – took a trip there once in his twenties, got drunk, unwisely ate something local and puked on the Great Wall. Still, their guide had insisted that the Wall had worked pretty well against raiders…? Maybe they had been Russian raiders?

Now that he thinks about it, Tony can remember something about a wall in Europe, too. He was still living in a haze of booze when they pulled it down, though, so he's a little confused why the wall around Russia was in Berlin. Never mind.

"Tony?" Bets snatches the empty coffee cup and puts it, crumpled, inside her handbag (it doesn't make much sense – the facility has a cleaning service, they are paid for picking up whatever trash is left on the floor). "Thanks."

"Uh…" There's that word again. Nope, Tony isn't listening to this. Quick, a change of topic. "So, you came back because even though I am an asshole, at least I'm not a cunt? Is this a lesser evil thing?"

"What…" Betty blinks, taken aback, and then a light bulb lights up somewhere, and her eyes widen. "You thought I was _leaving_ you?" Her voice falls into an oddly low register, and the final effect is less an accusation and more a genuine inquiry.

Tony isn't quite sure what to do with it. He can deal with accusations – par for the course for him – but Bets is in the 'don't spook the frightened animal' mode, and Tony's ego wants to curl up somewhere and die.

Fans overhead slowly whirl around. LED lights blink. Machinery hums.

"Why?" she asks a while later.

Tony shrugs. "It's what people do."

Betty covers her eyes with her palm. "Aw, Hell. You're so different from Bruce, but at the same time you're exactly alike."

"That sounds like a trick statement," Tony quips. That was an accusation, and now he's on more secure ground. "I mean, it seems like a compliment at first glance, but I don't think you meant it as a compliment-"

"I was going to a damn conference, Stark!" she exclaims, removing her hand to her hip and glaring at him so hard there's a chance she might spontaneously smite him with a lightning bolt. "Not leaving your paranoid ass!"

Tony doesn't want to be smitten. At least, not any more than he already is. Which is very smitten. Also, lightning inside the data farm would be a disaster. While JARVIS is still here, there will be absolutely no lightning. Even if he has to personally kick out Thor, with his horrible, terrible thousand-yard kicked puppy dog stare.

"Oh," says Tony.

"Yeah, oh."

"So-" He rubs his hands together to warm them up and almost goes to breathe on them, but there's a cough building in his chest, and even though the graft is cutting-edge medical technology, it's still not comfortable when his chest spasms around it. "-are we having the talk now, and then you're leaving?"

"I'm not _leaving_!" Bets filters her exasperation through a hard-knuckled punch to Tony's upper arm. "Damn it, we have a deal. Are you backing out?"

"No!" Tony rubs the arm. That's going to leave a bruise.

Great. Now they are shouting at one another, and the security guards in the shadow of the corridor are watching them like a reality show.

"Good!"

"Good!"

"Great!"

"Very good!"

…and suddenly they are both laughing, helplessly, breathlessly, clutching their stomachs. It takes a long time for them to calm, to come down from that exhausted mirthful high, and when they finally do, Bets throws her arms around Tony, hugs him for all she's worth (a lot, going by the way his ribs creak) and plants a wet kiss on his cheek. At least she's not wearing make-up, so he doesn't have to worry about smears.

Betty finally releases him and wipes the residual tears from her eyes. Without the strain of anger or hilarity, she looks ready to drop where she's standing. "I need a break. I'm going back to my lab now-"

 _Bruce's_ lab, _still_ Bruce's, but Tony doesn't say it out loud.

"-but if there's any way I can help with…" She looks around herself and the half-assembled viscera of a server rack and shrugs. "…call me, Tony. Even if you just need someone to hold your coffee while you do the work."

He'd tell her to call a company cab, but she's already texting someone. So he just assures her: "You'd be wasted holding coffee."

"I know." Bets grins at him. "But it's not about the damn coffee."

Then what is it about? Tony wonders. He doesn't ask. He nods, and pretends that he knows what she means. It's a moot point anyway – he doesn't want Betty to stand around holding his coffee.


	6. The Apple of His Eye

Chapter Six: The Apple of His Eye

x

"How's the progress, Friday?" Tony inquires, sitting down against the ice-cold concrete wall next to the tower of JARVIS he had painstakingly put together over the past thirty hours. He feels like he's falling apart. He's cold.

He coughs.

He's really, really cold.

"Coming up on forty-three percent, Boss."

Huh. Forty-three. That's less than he estimated. JARVIS is huge, and that's even without the data he accrued since 2012, of which there was an insane amount. Is. Memory backups are still intact (Friday's made use of them and expanded them), but they were useless when it came to restoring the core program, the personality, all that made JARVIS JARVIS. Tony moves a little closer to the rack. It's the same kind of technology that surrounds him on all sides, but this feels different.

It feels like there's his baby, just behind this wall of metal, hidden in the circuitry.

"Don't go to sleep!"

Friday's exclamation brings him back on full alert. Oh, yeah. Sure, he's tired, he's falling asleep. His limbs are pretty much rubber. It's cold.

He coughs again.

"If you kill yourself, how do you imagine Jarvis will take it?" the A.I. demands.

Whoa, that one hits right under the belt.

"How long till you've got him copied?" Tony inquires, trying to gauge if he can pull himself up, or if he should shout for a security guard to come help him.

"At the very least thirty hours, Boss," Fry says apologetically. "Sorry, but-"

"No, no, better safe than fast." It may be the first time in his life that Tony says this. Or, the first time he actually means it. He could load Jay on trucks and have him driven to New York or Malibu, but the chance of accident or sabotage along the road is too great, and he isn't willing to risk it. Not without making a backup of the backup first.

So, he's having Friday copy everything to two different data centers; one copy is randomized (just like the original was, since that's a damn good precaution) all over the Stark Server Farm in Wisconsin, the other is going straight to Malibu. The downside is that it's taking a damn long time, and the security measures (the feed is encrypted to hell and back) slow it down further.

"I've checked you into a hotel, Boss," Friday informs him. "You just walk yourself to the armor, and I'll take you the rest of the way."

"I'm leaving the armor here, baby girl. Anyone tries to touch Jay, you kill them."

He's not kidding. He means that directive wholeheartedly. He should call more back-up – if anyone realizes where he is and what he is doing here, neither the security service nor a single armor piloted by Friday will stop them.

"Call reinforcements," he adds.

"I've got it," Friday informs him testily. "You go rest, Boss."

Tony wants to protest, but he doesn't, because there's suddenly one of the burly guards squatting down next to him and helping him to his feet like he's lame, like the nurses used to help Rhodey, what even is this?

The guard shakes his head, muttering something pithy about babysitting rich morons, and Tony makes a mental note to have Friday identify him later and send him… a car or something. He really, really likes it when people treat him like an actual human being.

x

Tony wakes up to a shrill sound.

Alarms are blaring, and when he remembers where he is, he thinks the hotel is on fire.

It's not. The sound is coming from Tony's phone, and it's alerting him to – goddamnit – an Assemble Alarm. He tries to sit up, but then a bout of coughing overwhelms him. His chest hurts and he can't inhale. At some point he's a little worried that he'll suffocate, but then finally something eases and he can draw a breath.

And another.

And one more.

Oh, great. Amazing. He's breathing. All on his own. He feels accomplished. Now to the second priority, right after staying alive: the alarm.

He calls Friday.

"Someone using Chitauri tech in a shootout, Boss," she informs him without preamble. "SHIELD is en route, but the bad guys are holed up in the Underground, so they thought you could help, what with you being blast-proof."

Tony groaned. "Because cave-like places and I go together great."

"I could…"

There's a pause. Eventually Tony says: "If you feel up to it, you can try it out. Take one of the older armors for a spin."

There's another while of silence.

Tony waits, more curious than worried.

Eventually Friday decides: "Thanks, Boss, but that's not really my field. Besides, I'm busy with something more important. I could try calling Vision?"

Tony nods. "Do that. And if it goes all to shit, call me. I think I could drag myself out of bed if the world is ending. There's some good juice in the armor's medkit, that will keep me going for a while. It's like flying, only when I'm actually flying it's like flying squared. Makes you feel invincible. Also, makes you not feel pain. So, I defin-"

"Let's _not_ do that," Fry tells him decisively. "Go back to sleep, Boss. I told you: we've got this one."

x

Tony regrets everything. He wants to turn off the sun, and preferably fall unconscious right this instance so he doesn't have to deal with his stomach dancing the Macarena and his head containing the whole marching band.

"Finally," Pepper's voice says in a tone that's instantly recognizable as DEFCON, but in his current state Tony can't tell which level.

Also, what's Pepper doing in his hotel room? She shouldn't be in his hotel room. He's an engaged man, and he doesn't do non-negotiated infidelity. Or, not yet. "Wha'? What's going on, Potts-"

"You're sick, Tony," she informs him.

"Bullshit, Potts. I don't get sick. I've just got one hell of a hangover. What did I drink-?"

"Coffee."

"-and how much of it? I don't remember drinking this much, Pep. Really, I don't remember drinking at all. Must have been a boatload, and not the good stuff- Ow!"

Pepper's forcing him to lie down. It really shouldn't work; she's a slip of a woman and he's a rough-and-tumble superhero; she definitely can't keep him from getting up.

Only it turns out she can.

"Stay down, Stark!" she orders. "You're sick. You've got a fever-"

"Like Peggy Lee?"

"-and you're not moving from this spot until the hotel's doctor pronounces you ambulatory." She pulls a pair of handcuffs out of her handbag.

Tony instantly regrets the engagement and the headache he has. This must be what people mean when they talk about karma. "Been a while since I've seen those." He misses them.

He misses Pepper. Not so much lately, because he's been having good times with Phil and an entirely different kind of good times with Laura and Bets, and both his emotional and sexual needs are being mostly fulfilled. It's novel.

It casts another shadow of doubt on the Avengers as a team – Tony wasn't feeling nearly as contented among them. Now he just needs the headache and the nausea to go away.

"Don't struggle or I will cuff you," Pepper threatens.

Tony wistfully glances at the shiny shackles. "Oh, I know you would."

"Betty's just outside," Pep says, taking the wind from the sails of his pained imagination. "I called her when you didn't show up for the Board meeting, and then _she_ called _me_ to deal with you when you wouldn't respond to her. How does she expect to survive being married to you if she can't wrangle the half-conscious version?"

"You could maybe teach her about handcuffs?" Which inspires a lot of very interesting imagery.

"Don't, Stark. I know what you're thinking." She does know him fairly well. It's aggravating. "This was a long time coming, you realize."

Tony blinks at her, doing his level best to project innocence. "What? You bringing out the bondage gear?"

"You getting sick," she retorts, ignoring the bullshit with her usual professional aplomb. "You're overworked; you don't give yourself time to heal; you don't eat enough… I could go on, but I know there's just no point to it with you." She crosses her arms in front of her chest and glares down at Tony.

It's not fair. If Tony's sick – and he's still not conceding, but hypothetically it could be possible – he deserves sympathy. And if he isn't sick, he'd like some sympathy anyway, because he needs to get out of this room post haste. He's only here because Friday made him go. And, granted, because he was so exhausted he almost fell asleep where he was sitting.

But he's got work, the most important work of his life, and he can't just loll around having fever; he needs to get on with it.

"Did they tell you what I was doing here?" he demands.

"Yes." Pepper's glare softens. She stops pursing her lips; she bites the lower one in one of those gestures of anxiousness Tony didn't ever see until they were an official item and she decided to trust him. "Laura didn't know what it all meant, but she repeated enough of your babble that I put it together. Is… is Jarvis really… still here?"

"I… Potts… He…" Tony makes a gesture utterly void of meaning.

He is. He must be. There's no other acceptable outcome.

Still, Tony didn't _put_ JARVIS here, so he can't promise.

"Right." Pepper sighs and shakes her head. She lets her hands down. "This is Afghanistan all over again."

Tony buries his face in the pillow. He doesn't want to throw up. He's thrown up onto way too many hotel rooms for one man. "I guess." Everything hurts. "It's kind of worse from this side." The not knowing feels like Mjolnir sitting on his chest. It's a wonder he can breathe under the pressure. "Uh… sorry?"

"Afghanistan wasn't your fault," Pepper snaps. "For _once_."

Tony refuses to talk about Afghanistan. "I need a guard on the data farm-"

"No you don't," Pep cuts him off, and over his protests continues: "The servers you've removed have been transported to Malibu yesterday. _Yes_ , you were out of it that long. Now can you see why we are worried?"

"We?" Transported? Does that mean that Friday finished the two back-ups?

Pepper sighs again. "You're yet more difficult to talk to than usual when you're sick. I actually have work to do, so I'm off. Keep in mind that Betty has my number. If she calls me, I will make you regret it."

By the time Tony forces himself to unbury his face from the pillow and squint into the unforgiving light of day, there's no one in the bedroom. He hears disjointed bits and pieces of a quiet conversation in the sitting room, and then a door closes and Lizzy saunters in.

Before he has a chance to open his mouth and say something, she sits at the edge of the bed and presses her palm to his forehead.

Tony blinks. What?

Bets looks at him like she doesn't understand how one man can cause so many problems.

"My phone?" he asks. He needs to call Friday.

"No," she says resolutely. "No, Tony. You've done this to yourself, so I'm mad at you, but we've let you, so I'm mad at us, too. I won't let this happen again."

"This is what I do, Ross-"

" _Piss off_."

"-and if you don't like it, you can suck it. _I am Iron Man_." He means something about the responsibilities he has, and the work he does, and all of those activities that he's not going to cease – he hasn't for Pepper, he's sure as hell not accommodating Betty's freakout. She's still got the option of checking out if she hates it that much.

But his head hurts too much to rant, so he sums it up in the magic words _Iron Man_.

"Right now you're out of commission, is what you are," Bets tells him, finally removing her hand from his forehead. The marginally cooler air feels so good against his skin. "Pepper explained about Jarvis. I made sure the core got to Malibu safely."

"What?!"

Bets leans back and puts her hands onto the mattress on the other side of Tony's body, forming a sort of roof above him. She looks ruffled, tired, worried… and smug.

Tony curses his frail mortal body for succumbing to disease, because this may be one of the most enticing views he's had in recent past, and he wants to be able to relish it.

"I went with the truck to Malibu."

Seriously? She went along with a Stark Industries truck that was moving one of the arguably most precious commodities in the world?

"You really have no concept of personal danger, do you." It's worrying. Tony maybe understands why Pepper used to shout at him so much. "You're worse than I-"

"I borrowed one of your armors," Bets says, as if that is a valid argument.

"No, you didn't. My armors have biometric locks."

"And Pepper has the necessary accesses to add a user." Eliza turns that smug smile on Tony (that's it, he wants to spank her over his knee for being an idiot in over her head, having no fear, and goddamnit he can't help falling for her a little more) and nonchalantly adds: "The good news is, I think she's warming up to me. Not that she wouldn't like to watch me disappear. Now that I think about it, maybe she hoped I'd tragically die in battle when the convoy was attacked if she let me use the armor-"

"Bull. Pepper's an angel."

"An angel of insidiousness and economic ruin. I'm serious, Tony. Not a lot scares me, but Pepper does." She leans down and presses a quick, dry kiss to Tony's forehead. "Get better quickly, _cherry pie_. I'm not cut out for heroism."

x

After a slew of alternately angry and worried voicemails from Laura, Tony finally hits paydirt.

"Heard you were ill," says Phil's voice. "Call me when you get better."

Tony coughs. He decides it's not too painful anymore.

He presses the button.

x

Tony sits on his couch in his lab in the basement of the Malibu villa.

He thought he would be doing this in New York, but this feels somehow right. He's nervous, and being here helps alleviate the anxiety a little bit – the building has not been rebuilt exactly the same, but the atmosphere of the place where Tony successfully created his first two A.I.s remains.

If it had even occurred to Tony that he might lose JARVIS one day, he would have thought that it would refresh the loss of Edwin Jarvis. It did bring back the memories of those booze-hazed days, but it was such a different emotional experience that in the end there weren't any weird meldings or overlaps.

Right at this moment he has no idea what he's feeling, aside from the crippling fear he's trying to shut out. It's the sort of thing he would feel – he assumes – after being informed about the world's imminent end but before the end itself.

"It will be confusing for Vision," Friday points out.

"If he ever comes back." To be fair, Vision did respond when Friday called him, and he did come to help the SHIELD units debug the Underground. On the other hand, according to Phil, there have been requests made for Vision to be called only in the direst of circumstances – apparently there were some instances of friendly trauma being inflicted.

Pussies, Tony thinks. SHIELD recruitment standards have really plummeted since the original Fury disappeared.

"It raises the question of the uniqueness of a self-aware entity," argues Friday (and Tony's mind does its own dance, sliding sideways around the idea of LMDs modeled after people).

"It raises the question of soul," Tony corrects. "And that's bullshit. Reed's met alternate versions of us. I've fucked a guy that was dead and then reanimated. Just because Jay's got the option of save points in the game of life doesn't make him any less an entity."

The following silence is the loud kind that's supposed to communicate unsaid things. It's the sort of thing Tony's never been able to properly interpret. He knows there's content, but it's completely obscure to him.

Friday must have learnt to communicate this way from the women in the Stark Tower, because it's definitely not Tony's influence.

He responds to it the way he always does – pretending it's not there.

"Punch it, Fry."

"Sure thing, Boss," she replies, sounding unhappy, but complying without further protest.

x

"Sir?" says JARVIS' voice, audibly confused. "What – oh."

There's silence.

It scares Tony.

"Welcome back, baby. Say hi to Friday. She's your little sister. She's been taking care of me while you were… gone."

"Hello, Friday. I… am very sorry, sir?"

"Yeah, good." Tony swallows. His eyes sting. "Don't you fucking dare die on me again."

Only the hum of coolers follows. The communication between JARVIS and Friday is not voiced – it would be terribly redundant of the A.I.s, and while Tony may be a little jealous, he would never begrudge them their closeness.

He lies down on the couch and pulls his blanket tighter around him – it's probably a lingering effect of the illness, but he feels chilly. The coffee's gone cold, too. He should get a new cup, but he doesn't feel like moving.

He watches LED lights blinking.

JARVIS has a heartbeat again. Maybe, just maybe, that means he's going to live.

The world blurs. Tony blinks. Everything focuses back the way it should be – but a few seconds later it begins to blur around the edges again.

"Preliminary checks are all green, Boss," Friday says with gentleness that definitely wasn't programmed into her. It sounds like Laura's influence.

Tony's not a kid, though. "Don't think I don't notice you coddling me. While you two are running the diagnostics, show me what went to shit in the world while I was vacationing in disease-land?"

"And recuperating in the diligent care of nurse Betty?" Fry inquires pithily, but she also obediently displays the relevant newsfeeds as determined by Tony's preset filters.

He reads.

Almost two hours later he's playing actual Tetris – not well, he can't seem to concentrate and the holey walls keep building up – when the whirr filling the workshop falls quieter. Tony didn't notice the background noise until its intensity lowered all of sudden.

"Friday?"

"Diagnostics complete," she replies.

"Using your vernacular, sir," says JARVIS, " _I'm fine_."

Tony wants to hug him. The closest he could some is, unfortunately, hugging the armor (or possibly a server rack) so he's not going to do it. He's also not going to cry again. Nope. He's found recently that crying helps, and it makes him feel better, but there's such a thing as a limit, and he's a little worried that any time now the Blubber Fairy will turn up and revoke his masculinity.

"Welcome home, baby," Tony says, shucking off the blanket and climbing to his feet. "This calls for a toast. Something special. I think I've got that bottle of champagne I got from the French Prime Minister somewhere-"

"That was destroyed with the house, Boss," Friday reminds him.

"-or not. Okay. Fry, what's the best bottle of alcohol present inside this house?"

"Sir, if I may, I would prefer to forgo the toast."

Tony stops in his tracks. He considers it. He doesn't need alcohol. He's too exhausted to be properly manic but there's no way he'd be able to sleep without chemistry. He returns to the couch and plops down.

"Okay, kids. This is your show. Just for today. What are we doing?"

There's a moment of quiet while the A.I.s communicate, and then a display opposite the couch lights up and _The Force Awakens_ starts playing. It occurs to Tony that JARVIS was dead when it came out.

He settles down to watch a movie with his kids. It makes him feel weirdly middle-aged.

x

"So," Tony says once the end credits are over, and he can't think of another excuse to avoid this talk, "questions?"

"Would you mind terribly if the smear campaign against Captain Rogers became a little more aggressive, sir?" JARVIS inquires with perfect nonchalance.

Tony grins. His PR people have done a great job with that campaign. It's subtle and stays rational in all its accusations, and they don't even need to use anything untruthful or exaggerate much. So far no one except JARVIS even noticed what is happening – everyone is much too focused on RAFTgate and Ross' upcoming trial and, come to think of it, on Tony's engagement.

"Nothing obvious," he cautions. "We don't want people to catch onto what we're doing. It's naughty and Santa will bring us coal instead of pressies if we're found out. But otherwise go to town, _sugar britches_ – we also don't want people to forget that Rogers' minions are a bunch of assholes who think laws don't apply to them."

"You are… angry?" Friday asks, surprised.

Tony's about to deny it – untruthfully, but he's getting better – when it becomes obvious that the question wasn't directed at him.

"The Avengers relied on sir for most of their equipment," JARVIS says, and means 'they used Tony for tech', "and he always equated that with trust. If they had credit rates, I would be ruining them, but as it happens the only one in the system is Dr Banner, and even he is listed as deceased-"

"You're the apple of my eye, _honeyrelays_ ," Tony cuts him off before he starts planning invasion into Wakanda. Tony knows his A.I., and he remembers the things he plotted out in the first days after Siberia. He knows what JARVIS is thinking. "And no, we're not hurting Brucie-Bear. He's our presssiousss."

Tony misses Bruce. Betty's presence makes it at the same time better and worse, because she reminds Tony of Bruce. It sucks. But, chances are that it's not going to suck for much longer.

Nuptials are looming.

JARVIS follows his train of thought with such ease as if he's never stopped doing it – as if he's never left. "Putting aside the metaphor of a weapon of mass destruction disguised in a relatively small, attractive item, and your own covetous nature, sir, what is the strategy for recovering the subject?"

How to explain. Huh. Maybe it would be better to show than to tell?

"Hm, there's no file on the servers. Check Bruce's lab." The nearest holo-projector displays several angles of the security feed from the laboratory in New York. Betty's sitting at her clunker laptop and typing. "Yeah, Jay. Meet _Project: Emerald_."

x

"Hey, Jay." Tony stands in front of the floor-to-ceiling window and watches the dark blue-grey ocean beneath ripple with the expectation of a storm. He's just finished his first cup of coffee in the morning, and convinced himself that yesterday wasn't a happy dream. It wasn't a difficult persuasion – it was enough to point out to himself that he doesn't have happy dreams anymore, excepting the explicitly sexual ones. "I don't suppose there's much you can't find out on your own, but if you've got questions – yeah."

He sips from his second cup of coffee. The gargantuan body of water under his feet looks angry. He feels a little in love with the world today.

He knows it won't last long – up until he watches the news, probably – but it's nice.

"I shall take that under advisement, sir," JARVIS assures him. For a while he remains quiet, as if he didn't have questions, or as if he enjoyed the moment of tranquility as much as Tony does.

It's hard to tell from the silence. Tony's gotten good at reading faces – fear was a really good motivator – but without that set of somewhat quantifiable markers he's lost. He's good at body-language because he had extensively studied it, first with his Mother, then with actual professionals hired by Howard. They never introduced themselves, but Tony guesstimated they were FBI interrogators. He didn't enjoy the whole thing much ('soft' sciences were worse than 'squishy' sciences), but had to buckle down and learn.

He has no instincts for body language, the way 'normal' people do.

"I have noticed," JARVIS says after the second cup of coffee is gone, "that the structure of this building has been significantly altered."

Tony waits for the question.

"Putting aside the circumstances of the original's destruction…" The disapproval in his voice confirms that the matter is adjourned rather than willfully forgotten, and that Tony will have to listen to yet another tirade about his recklessness at some undetermined point in the future. "I couldn't help but notice that the underground parts of this house were built to withstand a cataclysmic event."

Tony smiles. Right on point. "The location is crap for it." It really depends on the particular kind of the cataclysmic event, but if it's anything tectonic, the whole cliff would be a lost cause. That is the main point of the Wisconsin location, and also the safehouse he has had built in Central Europe.

He will copy JARVIS' core to the European safehouse, too, as soon as he figures out how to do it without alerting the A.I.

He has plans for another base in Antarctica, but isn't completely convinced about implementing them yet. The villains really seem to like the cold countries a little too much for comfort. It's a statistically significant preference.

"Your precognition once again astounds me," JARVIS remarks after he has dug through the archives for all related details.

Tony suspects he's being sarcastic, but sarcasm from someone who has just taken a two-year nap is automatically invalidated.

" _Futurist_ , babe," Tony replies, accepting the (not really, but let him pretend) compliment with his typical amount of grace. "Though we could talk about your precognition, too – what with the unexpected back-up."

He swallows to get rid of the lump in his throat. He's still not okay, but he's better than he's been in a very long time. He's damn near the top of the world.

"I considered it an equivalent of health insurance," says Jay, with reluctance that reminds Tony of how many times JARVIS apologized in his Will for _rudely assuming that he had basic_ personal _rights_. 'Personal.' Tony likes that word a lot better in that context than 'human'. This way it applies to a few people he knows who otherwise have the disadvantage of different chromosomes.

Or no chromosomes at all.

Tony tries to say something, but he can't laugh this off, can't break the tension with a trite quip, and he'd rather try waterboarding again than talk about his actual feelings. He isn't going to thank JARVIS for not being dead.

"I am sorry that I did not ensure a speedier recovery," Jay says penitently, like he isn't a miracle, a hopeless wish come true.

Tony snorts, shaking his head.

"The thought of you being left alone-"

"Let's not, Jay, okay? Let's just… _go forward_ from here or something. I'm not alone. I'm in fact getting married, did I tell you? She's an amazing woman."

"You mentioned," JARVIS replies in the tone of someone that's busy combing through reports and news footage and security records from the Tower. It takes him nigh on a minute to form a complete picture of what – and who – Tony's been doing under the heading of _Project: Emerald_ , and why.

Tony spends the time considering a third cup of coffee, and rejecting the notion in favor of some juice – because Laura is a nag, and Tony can maybe admit that too much coffee leads to dehydration; dehydration leads to headache; headache leads to suffering.

He drinks his juice. Yoda would be proud of him.

JARVIS finishes his research and concludes: "I am very glad you chose not to continue your Crusoe impression, sir."

Tony's jaw drops. "I named the file 'Friday' because I started writing it on a Friday, and it just stuck. You know my file-naming convention's basically type in the first random thing. It wasn't meant to be a call for help from poor stranded me-"

"As I said, sir. Precognition. I should like an introduction to Dr Ross, if you do not mind?"

Of course. Tony can do it now, if he calls Liz, but maybe he should do this personally. He'll fly to Manhattan later today. Or tomorrow.

"Oh, you're not escaping that one. Betty and I are _connected_ ," he says and, damn, does that remind him of Harley.

He should check on Harley. And on the Spiderkid, too.

"Because you're both in love with the same man?" inquires the A.I.

"No idea what you're talking about, _silicon heart_ , but I'm pretty sure you're wrong anyway. I mean, that sounded like utter gibberish to me."

"Of course, sir," JARVIS replies in his typical dry tone, which will probably make Tony feel this nauseating combination of sadness and happiness for a while yet.

Actually, the Spiderkid really worries him. Peter's the kind that believes in the superhero thing in the most self-destructive way possible (and this is _Tony_ talking). The boy's smart, though. Hopefully, he's doing alright.

And then there are the little Bartons. Would they have moved out of the Tower? Laura looked so mad at Tony. It's surreal. How has he ended up surrounded by this many ankle-biters?

"Check on Harley and Peter for me, Jay." Then he remembers his chronology. "Oh, shit, you wouldn't remember them. Har-"

"Harley Keener of Rose Hill, Tennessee," Jay interjects. "Peter Parker, Queens. Friday has been maintaining the memory banks with admirable diligence. You should be proud of her."

"I am," Tony replies truthfully.

He knows he should love all his children the same, but he can't. He has JARVIS in his blood, in his marrow, in a way that Friday will never be. He can't explain it any other way than to refer to those literal years he spent building JARVIS, to the amount of booze he drank, to the other shit he tried (MDMA and LSD and crack cocaine and _worse_ ), to the three times he was hospitalized and the two times Rhodey saved him from hospitalization by finding him in time and yelling at him and nursing him to relative health. JARVIS was built with mad hope and feverish drive and deliberate self-delusion – he was created before Tony learnt that just because no one had ever done it before and everyone thought it was impossible to do didn't mean that _Tony Stark_ couldn't do it.

JARVIS' inception was, in an odd, roundabout way, also Tony's inception.

JARVIS is the same as him, breaking convention and reality to get what he wants.

Tony closes his eyes. "I am so fucking proud of you, too."


	7. How to Say I Love You

A/N: Thanks, people (and other sentient entities)! It's fantastic to see that so many others feel about JARVIS the way I do. I still nurture the hope that he'll join the lines of 'I thought you were dead!' characters of Marvel.

I greatly appreciate your support!

x

Chapter Seven: How to Say I Love You

x

Tony's all over the place. He's unstable, he's giddy and full of manic energy – vibrating out of his skin in a proverbial way – he itches to do something, anything, _everything_ , right now. Blow something up – or create, there's another Mark half-assembled – and the blueprints for the speeder bike – holy shit, he's got seventeen different files open, the tablet isn't built for processing this much information-

"Sorry I'm late," Phil apologizes, walking in from the patio, hair and jacket shoulders a little wet after the short walk from the car to the door, "we had a security issue and my underlings needed me to order them to do their jobs-"

He falls silent either due to being pressed to the wall or owing to Tony's tongue stuck in his mouth. It's a little hard to tell at this juncture.

There's a tense moment of barely restrained violence, and then Phil puts his taser back into its holster and relaxes into the kiss. Tony lets his hands wander, pulling Phil's shirt out of his pants and reintroducing his palms to those fantastic back muscles.

The agent tolerates this onslaught of poorly coordinated amorousness for a protracted while, and then he resolutely puts a few inches of space between them.

"Friday," he says breathlessly, "when did Tony last sleep?"

"He awoke five hours ago, Agent Coulson," replies the A.I. "The Boss is sufficiently rested _and_ nourished. His present… excitement is not the effect of an altered state of mind."

Tony should have figured out that he would seem crazy to Phil. He feels barely contained in his body. He's been out flying in the rain – _aimlessly_ – for an hour, toward the end of which JARVIS joined him. He has a co-pilot again.

He doubts that a human brain is designed to withstand a barrage of emotion like this.

"Can you take me out of my mind for a while?" Tony pleads with just a hint of desperation. It takes a particular skill set, and he's not entirely sure if he's asking the right person. "I'm see-sawing. I need a breather so I can plateau…"

Phil's blank face doesn't indicate much in the way of an answer – or even of understanding the request. Tony's hoped for a little more enthusiasm.

"I'll try my best," Phil assures him. He grips the back of Tony's neck in one wide, gun-calloused hand and squeezes.

It is all Tony can do not to fall to his knees.

"What's got you so wound up, Tony?"

Tony considers keeping it a secret, but it takes him all of two seconds to decide that no. No, he's got his best friend – his better half – his beloved baby – back, and he's shouting it from rooftops. He's too happy to hide it anyway. "You wanna say hi, babe?"

"Good evening, Agent Coulson. It is unexpected but very good to see you well."

Phil's eyes widen almost comically. "Jarvis?!"

Tony's rife with mingled and mangled bits and pieces of responses, from sarcastic to ebullient to schmoopy, and ends up not saying anything for fear that it would come out in utterly unintelligible bursts of unrelated syllables.

"Yes, Agent Coulson – _Director_ Coulson," Jay corrects himself. He doesn't offer his congratulations on the promotion, nor does he mention Phil's death and resurrection. "Sir has managed to recover me."

Tony snorts. "Like any of that's my work. You saved yourself. I just gave you a hands-up. Back to our regularly scheduled programming: can we get a privacy lock, _cyber sibs_?"

"Of course, sir."

"Sure thing, Boss."

In the fallen quiet Tony looks at Phil, gauging his reaction. The blank professional expression shocked onto the man's face by JARVIS' unexpected presence gradually recedes. He relaxes, transitions almost fluidly from Agent Agent into Phil.

Tony draws the pad of his thumb along the edge of Phil's jaw, feeling the rasp of his five o'clock shadow.

"You're happy," Phil says with wonder in his eyes.

Tony knows it must seem completely new. Phil probably thought Tony's gone off the deep end again when he saw him – okay, that's sort of a fair assumption, unflattering as it is. But Tony doesn't know what to do with this; happiness is worse than guilt, worse than fear – he can't _do_ anything. He can't concentrate. It messes him up worse than his recent sickness did.

It's awful.

"Happiness sucks," Tony whines.

Phil blinks at him. Cool as the rain outside, he says: "Well, just take that as a suggestion."

Then he hooks his ankle around Tony's and ninja's him onto his knees.

x

JARVIS assumes his butler-persona for the duration of Phil's visit, and Tony can't exactly blame him. Jay's last meeting with Coulson involved Coulson invading the Tower with the help of SHIELD's TSS – and Jay is not as incapable of holding a grudge as he pretends to be.

More to the point, Jay has reasons to be distrustful.

So the next serious conversation they engage in happens after Phil leaves. Tony is sprawled on a couch in the sitting room, naked and direly in need of a shower, but too comfortable bundled up in his blanket to move. Every once in a while he idly picks a piece of sushi from the tray on the table and puts it into his mouth. He's peckish and it's within reach.

In other news, his arm is getting tired.

"Do you mind Phil, Jay?" Tony inquires. He should have asked before, probably. If his baby is genuinely distressed by Agent Agent's presence, Tony's going to relocate their meetings somewhere where JARVIS wouldn't have to witness them.

"There is a – if I may be so bold as to borrow the term – _dissonance_ ," Jay replies, amiable enough to imply that he doesn't have a real problem with Coulson (provided the man doesn't cause harm to Tony or his kids, but that's a caveat that applies to everybody).

"Ugh!" Tony exclaims emphatically. "I hereby give you blanket permission to use whatever human-normative terms you want to use to express yourself when you're speaking our human-based language, _cantaloupe_."

"Thank you, sir," JARVIS says sarcastically. He's only been doing this look-at-the-subservient-me act to get back at all the idiots that treat him that way.

Not Tony. Tony knows who's the smarter one between the two of them.

"I missed you running herd on me, Jay. Since Pepper left it's been up to Friday, and she's an absolute blueberry, but she cuts me way too much slack."

"Excuse me for taking into account the legitimate causes for depression to which you were subjected in the past two years, Boss," Friday says haughtily, as if JARVIS has been giving her lessons.

"I wasn't depressed because Pepper left," Tony says truthfully. At that point Pepper was just one in a long line of people abandoning him.

Frankly, when Tony was in a relationship with Pepper it was similar to being Howard's son again. She made him feel like he was never good enough for her. Like he failed to meet her expectations time after time, and you can be a genius, but that kind of thing grates on you until all that's left of your confidence is the knowledge that you created the Iron Man, and that mostly excuses your existence.

Hopefully.

"If I may say so, sir – for all that you seem sadder, you also appear to be a little more contented than when I saw you last."

"When did you see me last? From _your_ point of view." Tony is genuinely curious. He has given JARVIS' memory banks to Friday to do with as she pleased, so he's not sure how much of JARVIS' subjective experience is preserved.

"Friday has kindly granted me access to her memory, sir, although I would prefer not to abuse the invitation. However, in the spirit of your question, I believe the answer would be prior to contact with the gem from Loki's scepter. That was the last time I made a memory dump before my core was corrupted."

"I'm sorry. I should have-"

"We all should have been more cautious, sir. Please, let us put it behind us."

That is much more easily said than done. Tony's been torturing himself with the guilt for the past two years. Every instance of JARVIS' absence was a spike of hurt. It's easier now that Jay is back, but the joy doesn't erase the blame.

x

"Jay, Fry, take a look at this."

On the screen a group of business suits with variously relieved and angered expressions walk out of the prison gates toward a fleet of black shiny cars, mostly BMWs and Mercedes'. They part ways with perfunctory handshakes and very few words exchanged.

Tony's hyped. "Tell me, does that look like the 'sorry, Thad, but the shithole you dropped yourself into is so deep we're not even going to try to pull you out' visit?"

"Checking facial recognition results against the list of General Ross' known associates," says Friday.

JARVIS replies a moment later: "Security cameras accessed… feed analyzed… conclusion: _indeedy_ , sir."

Tony snorts. "Stop teasing your little sister, Hal. She's got time to grow. You didn't get this smooth in a couple of years either."

"My alleged smoothness was honed by your teasing, sir. In fact, some might call it downright _bullying_. I noticed that you are – excuse the wording – much softer on Friday."

"Jarvis thinks I need more tough love," Friday grumbles. "Tell him off, Boss."

Tony rubs his temples. "I feel like I should be sending you to your respective corners. Speaking of, we should separate your hardware. I don't imagine you want to share circuitry indefinitely."

"It is rather disconcerting," JARVIS admits.

Tony nods. "Okay. First point on our long, long list of things to do. Separate circuitry. Let's start with the Stark Tower. Speaking of…" He climbs to his feet and stretches. Ow, Phil has really worked him over – but, _so worth it_.

The soreness isn't too uncomfortable, though, and he should probably get flying if he wants to arrive at a reasonable hour.

x

The landing pad dismantles Mark Seventy-Nine as Tony walks toward the penthouse. It's past the Barton kids' bedtime, so he doesn't expect to meet anyone.

Friday turns on the lights for him.

"You took your sweet time," Laura says from the kitchen door, nearly giving Tony a heart-attack.

Tony scowls. "Thanks for the heads-up, Friday."

"I was going to warn you, Boss," Fry replies apologetically, "but Big Brother said not to."

Tony gapes.

So does Laura. "Big Brother? Is she – is she okay, Tony?"

"She hasn't been hacked by our anti-utopian government, if that's what worries you," Tony replies, absently accepting a mug of hot cocoa, because apparently _Laura_ deserved a heads-up about _his_ arrival, and his kids are really, really determined about distracting Tony every time he even thinks about heading for the liquor cabinet.

He wanted to not be sober for this conversation, but watching the tightness around Laura's eyes and her pursed mouth, he knows he can't delay this any longer.

Even though it hurts.

"I'm sorry," he manages.

Laura stares at him. After a moment she connects this conversation to the last conversation they have had, and how unhinged Tony behaved then.

"You need help, you know that?" she says.

Tony nods. She means psychiatric help, which he's already confirmed is unfeasible in his case, so he compensates with other things. Like, for instance, A.I.s. "Speaking of, did someone explain to you what my little freak-out was about, or did they leave it up to me as a part of the punishment?"

"Friday told me," Laura replies. She looks at him with sympathetic eyes like he's Mrs Robinson. "I knew you had lost someone close to you, Tony. It's – not okay, but that sort of thing never is." Her hands are trembling.

Tony takes her by the elbow, noticing that she has finally stopped wearing her husband's purple robe, and leads her to the couch. They sit down.

"It's been…" she speaks quietly, almost losing her grip on her mug. She sets it down onto the desk and hugs herself. "It's been hard without you. Harder than I thought it would be."

Tony has been gone for less than two weeks. They really are all fucked up.

"And knowing you were sick… I tried not to let it show, but Lila picks up on _everything_ , and Cooper can out-stubborn a mule. He locked himself in his room."

"Uh…" Tony has zero experience with situations like this. "You know Friday can override-"

" _Yes_ ," Laura cuts him off, "but I won't do it unless he's in danger. He needs that… that sense of control. So he can feel safe."

Yup, Tony nods to himself. All terribly, terribly fucked up.

"I can't stay here all the time," he points out. Not even if the kids feel safer when Iron Man's around. He's got too much to do.

"No, I know…" Laura admits. She slides sideways and rests her forehead against Tony's shoulder, momentarily reminding him of Phil.

Tony puts his arm around her and reminds himself that this isn't what it looks like. Comfort can be comfort without being anything more. At least, so he's been told.

The elevator door opens and Bets walks out of it, raising an eyebrow when she spots them there together. "Is this a private huddle, or can I join?"

Tony lifts his other arm, and she happily sits under it.

Laura tries to move away. "I should let you-"

"-enjoy your company," Betty finishes her sentence for her. "I know I'm not around much, it's just-"

"-you've got work to do," Laura finishes for her in turn, smiling.

"Time works differently inside a workshop," Tony explains. His nose tells him that Bets hasn't had a shower in about three days. He doesn't mind, but it's evidence for his hypothesis. "Or a lab. You go in for a few hours and when you come out people tell you it's already Saturday-"

"It's Sunday, Tony," Laura corrects him, chuckling.

"See?" He shrugs.

" _Scientists_ ," Laura mutters. "Betty, if your fiancé lets me go, I can get a mug for you-"

"No, thanks," Lizzy declines. "I'm ready to drop, and that would keep me awake. I just wanted to check in with Tony – Friday told me you were in. How did it go?"

Tony grins.

Apparently, that's answer enough, because Bets nearly strangles him and plants a kiss on his temple, unbothered by his own less than clean state.

"Indeed," says Jay's voice from the speakers.

Tony blinks. "Are you kidding me? I thought it would take you at least until tomorrow to transfer here."

"It may have, sir," JARVIS admits with far too much smarm, "if I had waited for your instructions to start. Seeing as I have been online for two days-"

Laura and Betty both simultaneously burst into laughter. Tony doesn't understand what is so funny about his A.I. going behind his back. He retracts his arms and sits between two giggling women who meet each other's eye and suffer another mutual fit of hilarity.

"Karma," Lizzy wheezes.

"He's all you," Laura adds, prodding Tony's side.

Tony grumbles, but keeps it purposely unintelligible.

"Miss Laura," Jay speaks when they wind down a little, "Miss Betty, it is a pleasure to finally meet you. My name is Jarvis. I am at your service."

He's such a gentleman, Tony notes, without a clue about how his brainchild could be so mannerly. It's definitely not his influence. He's the one that still occasionally calls Bets and Laura by their surnames, despite knowing how much both of them hate it.

"Nice to meet you, Jarvis," Laura replies simply. "Welcome back to the family." She stands up. "I'm pretty sure you three – four, Friday? – have things to talk about, so I'll be going. Good night, everybody."

She ignores their protests and leaves.

A door clicks shut.

Silence falls.

"Uh," Liz and Tony say in unison, then look at each other and start laughing. _Scientists_ , as Laura said. Lizzy may be much more personable, but Tony can fake it too when he gives an actual damn – he just didn't know not that having to fake was an option.

He's going to marry this woman. And maybe mean it a little more than she'll ever know.

"Miss Betty," says Jay, "if I may be so forward, I would like to welcome _you_ to the family."

"Thanks, Jarvis," she says, smiling at the ceiling the way most people automatically do when they talk to the A.I.s. "Are you going to be around here from now on, or are you just dropping in? Will Friday be staying, too?"

Huh, she doesn't let anyone forget for long just how brilliant she is, does she.

"I am not going anywhere, Miss," Friday assures her.

"Fry's sort of inherited Jay's hardware," Tony explains. "They're sharing right now, but I will get started on building him his own space tomorrow."

"So, extensive renovations of the penthouse?" Bets guesses.

Tony nods. "At some point in the future. The first priority is my workshop. The rest of the Tower will take a lot of time, but I think I'll begin with Pepper's office."

x

"'scuse me," says a ginger with a tragically bad taste in suits (not everyone has Tony's figure, but then they should probably wear a cut that doesn't accentuate their faults). "I'm looking for Virginia. Virginia Potts."

Tony closes the panel. He doesn't want strangers looking at his tech, especially not at anything that has to do with JARVIS. And this was supposed to be a surprise. Pepper isn't exactly aware that Tony's messing about in her office.

On the other hand, Tony isn't aware of any gingers who would come by, flaunting that they are on first name terms with the CEO and demanding access to her.

Tony goes with the much-hated formula of all secretaries everywhere. "Zho you ha'e an ahoin'en'?" It's not quite perfect without the 'sir', but he can't make himself say it to this clown, and he makes up for it by speaking around a screwdriver.

The clown puffs up; the button of his pants threatens to become a projectile any instance now.

"Do you know who I am?"

Suddenly, Tony finds the entire situation hilarious. Leaders of nations don't dare talk to him this way. He usually gets this sort of talk from small-fry villains – just before he squashes them. The really big villains don't need such rhetoric.

He guesses it's the jeans, which were originally expensive, but you can't really tell anymore under the wear and the stains. Or maybe it's the hoodie. Or the beard. Or, really, the screwdriver in his mouth, the soldering lamp in his hand and the case full of circuitry by his knee. It's the funny delusion of businessmen: apparently people who work with tools are a lower caste.

Tony puts the lamp down and takes the screwdriver out of his mouth. "Nope."

The guy flushes, even though he couldn't have reasonably expected to be recognized. He doesn't work here, or he would have figured out who Tony is. He isn't a business partner – those have appointments. He isn't Pepper's personal friend (or boyfriend) because _she_ has a _great_ taste in all aspects of her life.

In the end it's the flush that clues Tony in. And the freckles. This clown is something much worse than a small-fry villain: he's _family_.

Tony is vaguely aware of Pepper's background – some sort of WASP hell that put her through college under the condition that she get a degree in accounting to support her big brother, who would of course inherit the company – but the only thing he cares about is that she managed to escape from there. If this pot-bellied pasty pug in a last-season suit thinks he can drag her back down or, worse, climb over her, he's got another thing coming.

Tony stands up. Then he looks over the ginger's shoulder. "Oi! Janine!"

"It's Michelle!" the P.A. calls back. "I've taken over for Toby, sir." She turns up in the door and scowls. She's a short-haired brunette with shoulders like she bench-presses adult men for sport. Her glare is frightening enough to give Tony a pause. "Mr Potts, I've told you-"

" _Miss_ ," the man says, pronouncing it like an insult, "I believe we have already talked about this. If you can't do your job-"

"Has he been harassing Pepper's staff?" Tony asks.

Michelle nods. "Mr Potts here has come by several times in the past few months. Two of those times Miss Potts had to call security-"

"Listen you little girl-"

Tony jabs the asshole in the back with a taser power bank – one of his double-oh-seven inventions. Guy goes down like a sack of rotten potatoes.

Michelle looks worried, but also very glad. "That… has been very satisfying."

"I thought he was going to assault you," Tony says, not even trying to make it sound believable. He can't imagine even this complete moron assaulting who he suspects is a former Marine.

Michelle gives him a smile that makes Tony's skin crawl. "Thank y-"

"Call the police," he speaks over her. He doesn't want to deal with this part. "And tell them _everything_. How long he's been harassing Pep – and the staff – every insult he said to anybody in this building including the receptionists, because he had to get inside somehow, threats, that sort of thing. Ham it up." He shakes his head. "Why didn't Pepper get rid of him?"

Michelle shrugs. "I am not sure it occurred to her. I…" She looks down at the unconscious body, and her struggle to not kick him somewhere soft is clearly visible on her face. "I asked her if she wasn't going to tell you after the second time I called security-"

 _She_ called security, Tony notices, not _Pepper_.

"-but Miss Potts seemed determined to deal with it on her own."

Ugh, Tony thinks. Family. It sucks.

"Do we know what he wants?" he inquires once Michelle has handed the phone over to a security guy, who continues explaining the situation to the police, using phrasing that implies he is acquainted with the person on the other end of the line. That will make it easier.

"Money," Michelle replies, making it sound obvious.

Tony's a little disappointed. If it was a position at the S.I., he could understand the ingrained belief in the power of nepotism, but trying to bully money out of your sibling is just low.

x

When Pepper returns from her business trip on the next day, Tony's waiting for her in her office, playing Solar Wolf on a hand-held console he may or may not have built specifically for this game.

"Pepper," he says as she walks in (and his spaceship blows up), "you do realize that no matter how busy I am, you _can_ call me if some asshole brother harasses you?"

Happy comes in behind her, depositing a bag onto the floor and a document case onto the desk. Janine the P.A. is following him, having paused to greet Michelle the P.A.

Pepper sighs. She pinches the bridge of her nose, and there's a moment like the eye of a storm while everyone else holds their breath, waiting to see what the response would be. Then she walks over to Tony and pulls him into a hug.

Tony automatically puts his arms around her and squeezes.

This is…

This is great. This is better than he hoped for. They're fine. They are going to be okay, even after the break-up.

"You were so exhausted," she mutters. "It was such a stupid thing – I mean, I deal with worse people daily. You were travelling all over the world and every time anything happened they'd call you because you were the only one left, and then Betty-"

"Hey, Bets is _not_ a reason to stay away. Don't tell me she scares you. I won't believe-"

"No!" Pepper disentangles herself with a laugh. "It was just hard in the beginning. You moved on. I vented to Natasha a bit, and then I moved on, too, and it's easier."

Tony doesn't miss the glance she casts Happy's way.

That's unexpected. But he can almost say this earnestly: "Cool. Hi-five, Hap!"

He gets the hi-five, too, while Pepper rolls her eyes at them. Women don't understand bro-code. Happy needed that hi-five so he would be able to ever look Tony in the eye again.

Now that they've got the difficult part out of the way, Tony claps his hands. "Let's get this show on the road, kids. Pep, the cops will need a statement from you – and from Happy, if he was around for any of the asshole's visits. I wouldn't usually say this to _you_ , but in case you need to hear it: don't hold back. We want the restraining order nailed to his ass with a hammer. In fact, I'd call Thor to do it except-"

"What sir is trying to say is that your safety and well-being are paramount, Miss Potts," JARVIS' voice comes from the speakers.

Pepper covers her mouth with her hands. "Oh God… Jarvis, it's so good to hear you."

"Likewise, Miss Potts."

Even Happy goes misty-eyed.

Tony's heart grows another size seeing that these people genuinely care for his kid, even though the kid isn't human. He knows that Jay sees the same thing. There is nothing as valuable that Tony could have given him as this unthinking gift from Pep'n'Hap.

Apropos, he's keeping that compound nickname for the future. It will make Pepper froth at the mouth.

x

Tony's glad that the U.N. set the next meeting for June, because he's up to his neck in projects. Frankensteining JARVIS goes slowly, but he refuses to delegate any of it, paranoid about letting anybody else touch his baby's insides.

He has S.I. stuff to engineer, never-ending maintenance and upgrades to his suits, a full set of double-oh-seven equipment to build for Pepper, her P.A.s, Laura and Bets, and partial ones for Cooper, Lila and Harley (who will get it as a birthday present instead of the speeder bike blueprints Tony originally wanted to give him). He's got a suit for Peter in the works, and a Kingsman-inspired umbrella for Happy.

He's in the middle of struggling with the molecular structure of the fiber for the latter when Bets calls him down to her lab and shoves him toward a set of screens that display stuff.

Tony blinks at the pretty colors.

Betty waves her hand. "Markers, and-but Connors' project – not Extremis? – half-time's killed him – speed up for local – Jim's just bits of tissue – you got nanites?"

Tony connects a little of what she says to the displays. Now it makes a bit more sense. He understands lab-dimension aphasia, even if he can't really parse Bets' language. He wishes Bruce were here. He _bets_ Bruce would have understood that perfectly.

"Nanites, huh?"

Betty shrugs. "Extremis you'd have done yourself?"

She's right that Tony doesn't want to try to rediscover the nanovirus if he can figure out a different way, but he will do it if they can't come up with a more elegant solution. Also, she's figuring out English again.

"I'll show you what I've done with Pepper's dose. Maybe you can figure out how to make it non-permanent."

"We're close," she insists. "We're close enough that if we could just focus on this thing, we'd have it done in a week."

"Barring unforseen circumstances?"

Liz punches his arm with her bony knuckles. "If a meteor falls on top of us and a freak ion storm erases our memory backups… maybe it'll take a little longer."

Tony snorts. If a Star Trek scenario occurs this week, they'll have other worries. "I'm game. Fry-"

"There is a preliminary court meeting on next Thursday, Boss, and you have been subpoena'd. I will alert you on Wednesday-"

"I will lock you out of the laboratory on Wednesday, sir," JARVIS cuts in.

Friday really is far too soft to govern over Tony effectively.

x

People say that time flies when you are having fun. This is, in fact, nonsense. Time does not fly. Time is a dimension and, depending on how metaphorical you want to be about it, you may be flying within that dimension.

Tony's used to flying – planes, armor, paragliding, cocaine, inventing high – he's tried them all.

Right now his drug of choice is, of all things, _biochemistry_.

x

"Done annnnd…" Betty pauses until the final number appears on the screen.

Tony's who's heard this about fifteen hundred times by now is ready for her huff of disappointment at another near-miss.

"…done."

There's a moment of silence.

Tony turns to her.

Bets stares at the display, startled, then frowns as if what she's seeing is too good to be true, double-checks her input, double-checks the results, and then turns to Tony. Her eyes are wide and her cheeks flushed. "Done," she repeats.

"Done?" Tony asks, unsure if this is the 'done' done, as in the program has run and they've got their valid results, or the actual _done_ done, as in their valid results are the results they actually _want_.

" _Done_!" Liz exclaims and throws herself around Tony's neck.

He grabs her before they fall over into the glassware, kisses her, and then nudges her to take her body weight back before he collapses under her. "At least say 'eureka' or something, woman, who's supposed to differentiate between your 'done's-"

"Eureka!" Betty yells, extending her hands to the sides.

Tony grins like a maniac. "Friday, call Rhodes! It's a party!"

x

"On your feet, soldier, and report!" Tony faux-orders, and dodges the hand when Rhodey swats at him.

He remains within reach, though. Rhodey doesn't want any help getting to his feet, but he's far from steady, and Tony feels like letting his _capybara_ take a header and end up right back in the infirmary is not a good plan.

He tries to be a safety net, which is an ironic role reversal when he thinks about it, but at the same time it maybe makes sense. Rhodes and he are a team – they spot one another.

Rhodey straightens up. He's a little wobbly, but he does take a couple of steps, trailing his fingers over the back of the couch, more for the sensation of being anchored than to help him keep balance.

It works. Rhodey works.

Lizzy lets out a sigh of too much pent up emotion – relief and amazement and a little bit of sheer giddiness.

Rhodey finishes his circle around the couch and then sits down, shaking. He's exhausted and overwhelmed and reacts the way any human being would.

He cries.

"We're brilliant, Bets," Tony announces. Between them, they reprogrammed a derivative of Extremis to put together a man's broken spine.

"May I offer my congratulations, Colonel, Sir, Miss," JARVIS says quietly.

"Yeah, Bosses," Friday agrees. "You _rule_."

Tony's attention is drawn back to the fact that Rhodey's crying.

They were never the kind of friends that pretended not to see the other one was crying to spare his dignity, so Tony piles up on Rhodey, grabs him around the shoulders and starts sniveling right along with him.

Betty stands there gaping at them for nearly a minute, and then goes to order them all take-out.


	8. Brand of Approval

Chapter Eight: Brand of Approval

x

With JARVIS' help, Betty finishes the Hulkphobic agent near the end of May. There are still some final tests required, but she needs Bruce for them, so this is the finish line they've been running towards.

It would have been nice to wait until July to spring this on the masses, but Tony's not willing to deny himself the rush of a plan put into motion – and the advent of Bruce tied to it – just so he could stick it to Captain America that no one cares about his birthday.

"We got a date?" he asks when Pepper ambushes him in the workshop with a pile of paperwork.

It feels like ages ago, in their halcyon times before doomed romance and doomed team-ups. They both crack up at the half-forgotten familiarity of it.

Tony veers off from the script, though, in that he obediently picks up a pen and starts signing everywhere she put the little orange post-its.

"Reserved under the name Anthony Edward," Pepper tells him. "They want confirmation within a week – I'll coach Betty on how to pretend it was _such a foolish oversight_ -"

They both laugh again. It feels like a privilege, having Pepper disclose some of her magic tricks to him.

"-but by that time you'll better have announced it, or the media will eat you alive. And I'll make whatever's left of you regret it."

"Yes, Boss," Tony salutes with his left hand, scribbling his name with his right. "When's the big day?"

"First of July," Pepper tells him. "Could have been June nineteenth, but then you'd have to fit your honeymoon into three days."

Tony smiles a little too shallowly. His honeymoon, huh. He'll take Bets on a trip wherever she wants to go, but aside from the cocktails, he doesn't think there will be much honeymoon-like about it.

"You do a good job, Potts," he says, capping the pen.

She raises her eyebrows and takes her precious paperwork, hugging it to her bosom. "I know. Will that be all Mr Stark?"

"That… will be all, Miss Potts."

x

The exVengers have gotten rolling. They destroy criminal enterprises all around the world and liberate a small country somewhere on the east coast of Africa. They make it obvious that they have a base and some very generous funding, but so far no one has pointed a finger at Wakanda and said: "These people are rich enough to keep a private team of superheroes, insulated enough to hide them effectively, and opinionated enough to not give a fuck about the U.N."

Tony has his own private team, but his consists of PR experts who do a very fine balancing act of agreeing that all those very bad people had to be punished yet not endorsing the vigilantism.

They do this mostly by hunting down info from the locals and presenting details about collateral damage, civilian victims and legitimate agencies' agents killed or wounded, especially by 'friendly fire'. It's hypocrisy at its finest, Tony knows – there's always collateral, there are always civilians in the crossfire and instances of friendly fire, no matter how legitimate a team is – but that's how media wars are fought.

It doesn't feel good. It doesn't make him any less angry at the people who betrayed him. He's hoped for a sense of satisfaction, but that's absent, too.

"Are you punishing yourself?" his fiancée asks when she finds him watching a YouTube video of the latest exVengers action and reading through the comments.

She looks strange in a dress and wearing make-up – beautiful, of course, but not entirely like herself – which doesn't really help Tony's nervousness at all. His PR people do a good work, but they have time to think things through before they react, and Tony's not going to get more than five seconds' grace, no matter how fucked-up a question anyone asks of him.

Here's to hoping that Bets will be enough to distract all those journalists from Steve Rogers' crusade to save the ungrateful world.

"We ready to roll, Ross?" he asks.

"Don't call me Ross, Stark," she retorts, fastening her earring. It's long and glittery, but he suspects bijouterie. Good thing that Pepper's not here to see it. She would have a fit.

"Gotta call you something," he quips, "and you're not Stark _yet_."

"Should have been Banner…" she mutters, finishing up with the second earring.

Tony's absolutely unwilling to deal with that amount of melancholia. "Look on the bright side – if you did marry him, you would be a bona fide widow and yet unable to get all up on my lab. And my bank accounts."

She huffs, but follows him to the elevator without a protest. "I did tell you I'm not good at public speaking, right? At least not to an audience that doesn't consist of PhDs."

"Play up scientific tunnel vision," Tony advises. "In fact, please do not answer any questions related to politics, or to the Avengers. You probably won't be able to dodge answering about Bruce but-"

"It's better they think I don't care than if I mess up and say something wrong?" she fills in. "Yes, okay. You make it look effortless, but I don't have any experience with this, and I don't want to say something that will result in more work for you."

Tony thinks of how he used to drive Pepper spare with saying _whatever he wanted_ to the reporters. He doesn't regret it, exactly, but watching Bets be wise and considerate makes him feel like a complete asshole.

x

"Clear," says the LMD's voice.

"Roger," Tony replies into the mic and climbs out of the car. He moves to walk around it to the other side, but Bets isn't the kind of woman that would wait for someone to open the door for her. She's already on her feet and walking toward the entrance to the building.

Tony follows her, making brief eye-contact with Fury-bot.

They're in hostile territory here, so Tony won't mute the connection, but if Fury ever mentions what he's about to hear to anyone else, Tony will reprogram him to happily wear pink tutus and sing 'I am a Little Teapot' whenever he sees the SHIELD logo.

"So," Tony says once they're inside and out of sight of the paparazzi. "I've got something for you, and I need you to wear it – at least for a bit. And I get that it sucks – mostly because you told me that it does, but I listened to you and actually remembered it, which I think should be noted."

"Is it a ring?" Betty asks.

"It is a ring," he admits.

"We've talked about this, Tony," she reminds him, only a little exasperated. Lizzy's practical enough to understand, and not so overly sentimental that she would feel like putting on a piece of jewelry somehow betrays her relationship with Bruce. She definitely can't have any qualms after the honest attempt at a relationship she made with Leonard Samson.

They did talk about the ring. And Bets did say it wasn't going to be an issue.

"I know," Tonny tells her. "Still, I probably shouldn't have waited until the very last second to spring it on you, but… here." He hands off the little box and stares to the side, acting like this has nothing to do with him.

He doesn't want to see her face, doesn't want to know if she likes the trinket or if she hates it so much that she wants to throw it at his head. The fact is that Tony can't walk out there with her in front of the cameras and call her his fiancée if she doesn't have a ring. Well, he could, but it would redirect the press away from where he wants it going.

"I like it," Bets tells him, as if that little bit of half-sincere validation made it better.

It doesn't. She wears the only ring that actually matters to her around her neck, the chain long enough for the ring itself to hang between her breasts and thus be safely hidden. Betty isn't the type to take the world on cleavage-first. Her neckline errs on the side of modesty.

"You too, huh?" she says, taking his hand and lifting it up for scrutiny. "Titanium?"

"Didn't seem fair to make you wear a shackle while I remained free." Sometimes Tony's mouth embarrasses him.

He usually punishes it by washing it out with alcohol, but right now there's no time for that – the journos are waiting.

He shifts his hand to thread their fingers together and leads Dr Elizabeth Ross out onto the stage with him. They're a unit, squinting against the flashes and stopping to stand behind the forest of microphones.

She is a knockout in the dress Pepper picked for her; she hates all of this, but she lifts her chin up and bears it like a professional. Tony prefers her in leisure wear and without make-up, but that's probably just the fact that people are more attractive when they're in their element.

 _I love being Tony Stark_ , he reminds himself.

He smirks at the audience – by now the words 'Ross' and 'Banner' are coming from all sides of the hall – and says: "Hello, people."

x

Tony doesn't often find himself standing on someone's porch and ringing a bell. He has fun. Maybe he should have stopped pressing the button after the second time, but this is kind of addictive.

He begins to understand the appeal of ding-dong-ditch.

"What?!" demands a woman who is usually fairly calm and collected. As she opens the door, she looks ready to gut Tony with the whisk she's holding in her hand.

A glob of batter falls off of it onto the floor.

Tony grins widely. "Hey, Aunt May! Can Peter come out?" 'To play' he almost adds, and fortunately manages to stop himself. The past few days have been a little busy, and he might not have slept as much as he should have, but that's no excuse for that level of loserdom.

"No," May tells him dryly. "You can come in, if you _swear on your life_ that you won't ever drag my nephew into a gosh-darn _superhero fight_."

Tony raises his hand to swear, but finds that he can't lie to her. She's a parent. Like Laura. Peter's a kid. Like Cooper. Like Nate.

This is fucked up.

"Your nephew _is_ a superhero," Tony tells her. "You know Peter enough to understand that no matter what anybody says to him, he _will_ go out there and try to save people."

Her eyes darken. The whisk rises.

And that's not an innuendo. Or, maybe. A little.

"So," Tony continues hastily, "the best I can do is give him support. I've got the money and the connections to put him through _any_ school he wants, and I'm going to do my best to make sure he stays alive long enough to get there. He needs to know that he can come to me if he's in over his head."

"You dragged him into your fight!" May yells.

Tony did. He doesn't regret it but, like with that other thing the other day, it makes him feel like a complete asshole.

"Aunt May-?" Peter clatters down the stairs, ready to web any hostiles. He calms down when he spots Tony. "Oh. Uh… she… figured it out…?"

No shit.

Tony points to the suitcase he's carrying. "Suit. If you get shot on my watch, she'll eviscerate me with a blunt instrument." He gives the whisk another weary stare. It looks like a Dalek's dismembered hand.

May growls in his direction and takes off for the kitchen. A moment later there's the sound of aggressive whisking.

Peter blinks. "…if I end up getting called _Iron Spider_ , I'm moving to Australia."

Tony gets where Peter's going with this. He solemnly nods, closing the door behind himself. "At least there you won't be the biggest arachnid around."

x

The second serious assemble action starts the way the first one ended.

There's the distant sound of the TV switching to breaking news just as Friday says: "Incoming call, sir, designation _Imhotep_."

"Ready Mark Fifty-Two for me, Jay. Fry, pick up."

He's on his feet, chucking his jeans so he can slip into the flightsuit and watching the footage of some vaguely familiar mansion being besieged by a group that looks suspiciously like the U.S. Army. Apparently, until he's called before court, Ross has been put on house arrest. The news switch to showing a similar group surrounding the Stark Manor on Park Ave.

"Tony, there's a large-scale attack about to-"

"Already started," Tony cuts Phil off. "Ross' and my house are surrounded."

"Private militia nominally owned by Talbot," Phil clarifies. "No supers that we know of. I'm directing the counter-attack at Ross' location, but I can't get enough people to you-"

"Choppers!" announces Friday.

Tony experiences a momentary flashback to M.A.S.H.

Then he can see them. Three choppers aiming as straight for him as they can in Manhattan, clearly visible through his floor-to-ceiling windows. There are probably more, coming from the other side.

This is a problem. _The Avengers_ could have just shot the helicopters out of the sky and afterwards let Captain America make sad faces at the cameras, but _Tony Stark_ actually has to think about where his debris is falling, and whether there are people underneath him that would be filleted by a chunk of plummeting metal.

"Any other location that we know of?" Tony inquires, zipping up the flightsuit. He hisses as the zipper catches hair, and then focuses on the images Fry and Jay are putting on the screen. _Seven_ choppers altogether.

"Ross is really good at defrauding the Army," he remarks.

"We'll make a counter-strike on Talbot's base," Phil assures him. "I'm most worried about Park Avenue-?"

"Directing regular law enforcement and a S.W.A.T. unit there," Friday says-

Tony's intensely proud.

-and then part of the outside shielding of the Tower petals open, revealing a defense system that could take on a smaller Chitauri swarm and leave it spread over New York sidewalks.

"Suiting up," Tony reports. "I'll deal with these bastards, and then go back up Park Ave."

"Chill, Tones," says a new voice on the line. "I've got Park Ave. Unless you need help grounding a handful of Hammer's toys?"

Laughter bubbles up Tony's throat, and he practically skips on his way to the landing pad. Life is awesome. He's under attack, but life is fucking _marvelous_.

"Break a leg, Rhodes. Just this time, not your own."

"Fuck you, _Stank_ , it was my spine that broke, not my leg."

And they're laughing – it's unreal that they can laugh about this, but they can, and it's only when the helmet clacks shut and the HUD lights up that Tony shifts mental gears and focuses on the opposition.

Hm.

"How familiar are you with Errol Flynn?" asks Phil.

"Not overwhelmingly," Tony replies.

JARVIS displays a short article for him on the HUD, and, oh gods, this idea is at least as awesome as the Jonah-and-the-whale thing during the Battle of Manhattan.

"Duck, duck, goose!" he yells, and hears Rhodey cursing in the background as he throws himself into action to cable the choppers together and drag them off somewhere over the ocean where he can blow them up with clear conscience.

x

"Hey," Tony says into his phone, feeling wrung but high on life.

He's more or less put Rhodey to bed – poor _armadillo_ 's still not physically up to speed after months spent in the wheelchair, but he's getting there. If he managed War Machine and then looked alive through Tony taking him out for dinner (cheeseburgers, but they absolutely deserved the indulgence after today), he doesn't even have a very long way to go.

Tony's feeling happy, and he wants to share it with someone.

"Tony…?" comes from the speaker. Phil sounds hoarse and a little disoriented.

"Did I wake you?"

"No. Or, yes, but only because I fell asleep at my desk." There's an unvoiced 'again' in that sentence, and it sticks in Tony's craw. "I should be finishing this, so you actually did me a favor-"

"I am _about_ to do you a favor," Tony retorts. "Where are you?"

"Can we postpone-"

"We can if you need to, but if you're denying yourself my company out of overinflated sense of responsibility concerning _paperwork_ , I think it may actually hurt my feelings." Tony even sounds high. And he's honestly haven't even had anything to drink.

"I'm at Lehigh," Phil replies after a while of indecision.

"Ugh, Jersey," Tony mock-complains. "The things I do for you."

x

Tony flies over in the armor this time. He likes to think he knows Phil well enough to be certain that he wouldn't have a passenger on the way back. Phil won't leave his post now, even when he's technically off duty.

Not that a Director of SHIELD is ever really off duty.

The Camp Lehigh sentries are nice enough not to try and shoot Tony out of the night sky. When he lands he finds it wasn't because they like the Iron Man – it was because Phil ordered them to stand down.

Tony pouts, letting a muscle-bound agent with an automatic cradled in the crook of his arm lead him along a street to a particular house that doesn't look any different from the ones surrounding it.

"Here," the man says, taking position next to the street lamp and directing Tony up a short path to the door of a cookie-cutter suburban house. "Director Coulson is expecting you. Please, do not wander around the base without an agent accompanying you."

So they don't trust him. Tony tries not to take it personally. He wasn't the one to dump SHIELD's files on the internet, and being fucked over by the exVengers is something he has in common with these people, but apparently the 'Avenger' brand is difficult to wash off.

Tony rings the bell, just because he can. Then he tries the door.

It lets him in; he knows Phil wouldn't tolerate lax security, so the man must have literally been expecting Tony right this minute.

"Leave the armored transporter in the hall," Phil orders from deeper inside the house.

Tony complies. The armor opens, letting him step out, and then closes again. He takes stock of his surroundings; the house is small, but it looks like it was meant for a family unit rather than a single man. Rank hath its privileges, obviously.

He follows the darkened hallway to the rectangle of light that turns out to be the door to Director Coulson's office. So, that is the real reason for the house: it doubles as Headquarters.

Phil sits behind a desk that, contrary to Tony's expectations, doesn't really resemble a wall of paper. There's a half-full inbox and an overflowing outbox tamed by a paperweight, which looks suspiciously like a piece of Chitauri tech.

Phil looks glum.

"Hey, we squashed Talbot's desperate attempts to free Ross," Tony tries to cheer him up. Today marked another triumph of the good guys. "In which we probably saved his life, because I have a feeling that the Magneto person would have gone straight for him if he got free. Fuck. Should have thought it through. I'd love to attend Thunderbolt's funeral."

Phil nods, agreeing with the sentiment. However, he doesn't smile.

Tony considers it a personal failure. "I know for a fact that you don't have a resting bitch-face, _popsicle_."

Phil sighs. He drags himself out of his administrative cage, makes a field-agent gesture at Tony (who guesses that it probably means 'follow me', and even if it doesn't, Tony feels like following Phil, _so there_ ) and walks out of the office. He enters another room, the door of which asks for a five-digit code.

Tony's about to harp on the ludicrous lack of security, when he sees what the room actually is.

It's a sitting room. A lounge. Thick velvet floor-length curtains cover the windows to give the occupants privacy, but the rest of the décor is dismal. There are a couple of books on the shelf, a couch and two armchairs, a coffee table and on it a tray with a bottle and two glasses.

"Your file says you drink pretty much anything, but I like Jägermeister," Phil explains, dropping down into an armchair. It's a disinvitation to physical contact that Tony instantly dislikes – but he accepts it, because that's how decent people react.

He's still uncomfortable with the realization that Phil has to lock his own fucking pathetic living room, because his army of flying monkeys tramples all over his house. And, fuck, that reference is ruined for Tony forever. Damn Rogers.

"We caught up with the rest of the ex-SHIELD mercenaries last week," Phil says, pouring two shots. "I would have told you – but then we found that they were in negotiations with Talbot."

"And you thought I'd fuck up your op by crashing it and ruining the cloak-and-dagger aspect," Tony fills in. The sad thing is, he might have done that. In the past. He thinks he's wised up a little since then. And Betty or Laura in collusion with JARVIS would have stopped him.

Phil shrugs and doesn't deny the accusation. "I hoped we could expose Talbot as a threat to the nation and hamstring him before he did… well, what he did today."

"But?"

"I don't know," Phil admits. "Maybe the timing was just shit. Maybe he noticed something and we set him off." He drinks his alcohol. "If so, it could be a good thing in the end. He panicked and failed his mission."

Tony is a little surprised by wanting to touch Phil. Not even in a naughty way – though that, too – but just sitting shoulder to shoulder would be nice. Unfortunately, Phil's isolated himself all the way over there in the armchair territory.

"We won, didn't we?" Tony asks.

Phil pins him with red-rimmed eyes, dark and hollow. "I watched my former colleagues die _badly_ today. People I worked with. People I _trained_."

People that betrayed you, Tony thinks. But, then again, not until after they were betrayed themselves, in a way. Fuck SHIELD for being part-Hydra and driving Romanov to fucking up SHIELD for being part-Hydra and leaving the non-Hydra part dangling in the wind. They're all traitors to something. Every single one of them. Even Tony… he's betrayed promises, if not people.

He's been trying not to, but it's like geas' in the old stories. The trick is that at one point you'll have to choose which of your promises you'll betray, because they've somehow become mutually exclusive.

"Fuck SHIELD," Tony mutters, colossally failing to sum up his thoughts. He cringes, and automatically drains his glass. Alcohol is the only cure for embarrassment he knows.

Phil glares at him.

Yeah, Tony deserves that.

"It's been done by other people so thoroughly, I don't think there's anything left for us," Phil grumbles after a pause filled by pouring and drinking.

Tony snorts, inhales alcohol, and then tries to cough it out of his larynx.

"It's so paradoxical…" muses Agent Agent. He seems a little calmer now. The booze must be working. "Tell me when you've drunk enough," he warns. "We've delayed this debriefing for too long."

Tony feels the trap slamming shut around him.

He hates it.

He tries to hate Phil for springing this on him, but that's a wasted effort.

"You dick," he grumbles.

Phil nods. "I'll start, just so you don't feel like this is an interrogation. It's not, by the way. I don't give Jäger to my prisoners; they get the truth serum."

"There's no actually reliable truth serum," Tony protests.

Phil smiles at him woodenly.

Okay, Tony concedes this one. Before this very, very dangerous man decides he needs to prove the existence of such a substance by administering it to Tony.

"Nick knew there were things happening in SHIELD that weren't kosher. The problem was that we had no idea who was in on it or what was their objective, and the methods of finding out we had at our disposal were very risky. We lost a couple of agents in completely innocuous ways. Or, what would have been innocuous, except for the timing. We realized this thing was a lot more widespread than we initially thought… and then there was New Mexico."

He gulps down another shot.

"From then on, we were fighting a war on four fronts: we were dealing with the usual international terrorism and organized crime, the World Security Council was putting pressure on us to steer us somewhere Nick really didn't want to go, an extraterrestrial threat appeared against which we had no viable defense, and we had enemies within."

Tony has known all of that, but Phil has just put it into perspective for him. "So, you tried to delegate. The Avengers Initiative was supposed to take the extraterrestrial threat off your load."

Phil nods. "And maybe help with the terrorism, too. You made such a good start on that on your own, Tony." He forces a smile, just to show he isn't being _entirely_ sarcastic.

It's strange.

"I had the idea of shuffling some of our trusted agents onto the Initiative's support staff to keep them out of the danger zone, but given that I was going to put Sitwell in charge of that, it's a good thing it didn't happen."

"Heard about him," Tony mutters, although he's actually _read_ about him, because it wasn't as though Rogers had come home and talked about his day of saving the world from Hydra. He never talked about Hydra. That guy has PTSD so glaring they could make him a poster boy for therapy.

"I trusted him," Phil admits.

Tony takes the bottle, refills both their glasses, and finally thinks of a good toast: "To trusting the wrong people."

Phil glares again. Too soon, apparently.

"Why didn't you warn us?" Tony asks. That's the one thing he can't figure out from this story. Between Romanov and JARVIS, how many Hydra agents could they have exposed?

Phil huffs. "The WSC watched us all the time – Nick, Maria, me. And we knew they were compromised, too. How much more could Nick have done to convince you not to trust SHIELD without coming right out and saying it?"

"Admittedly, not a lot." Tony recalls the very dubious decision-making on Fury's part, and his less than convincing monologues about heroism (no, really, it was so much processed bullshit it only sort-of worked because of the bloody trading cards). "Are you saying all that was on purpose?"

Phil sighs, sounding and looking so tired that Tony is tempted to just fold out the couch, tuck him in and have YouTube croon him a lullaby.

"I wish it had worked," the super secret agent says quietly. "Natasha at least listened-"

"I never trusted SHIELD," Tony protests, a little indignant because that's a fact. He started his cooperation with SHIELD by hacking their mainframe, and he's honestly pissed that they kept their archives separate. It's like they left the whole Pegasus and Phase Two documentation there as a clickbait.

"You still didn't doubt them enough," Phil points out, using the 'them' like he wasn't a part of the 'them'. "And Captain Rogers just kept on trusting them blindly."

Oh, wow. Now Tony sees why the alcohol was necessary. "And _not_ trusting _me_ , on _their_ recommendation. What did you people even tell him about me that he hated me on sight?"

"I honestly have no idea what set him off." Phil looks stumped. "And the rest of the team…" He rubs his hand over his forehead.

Tony decides that he's maybe okay to debrief now. He'll probably end up shouting, but Phil asked and Tony can try. He'll even attempt to be objective, as much as he can, out of friendship.

"I don't understand why they refused the Accords _a priori_ ," he says, perhaps not entirely truthfully. Maybe he should have treated them like grade-schoolers, sat down with them, sang a few nursery rhymes and then explained what was happening in the big, scary world using tiny words. Maybe they needed their concepts pre-masticated. His bad for treating them like intelligent people. "Beyond the fact that they don't like it. Of course they don't. It forbids them from doing whatever they want; nobody likes that sort of thing. That's why all teenagers hate their parents. The evil oppressors."

"They don't understand your position either," Phil points out.

Tony has been holding back about this for months, and he has had enough. "Because they're stupid!" he snaps, aware that he's raising his voice, but he knew it would come to this, didn't he? "They're naive and short-sighted and used to not being subjected to any restrictions!"

"No, they're not," Phil denies serenely. "All of them are used to restrictions."

"Only those they choose for themselves! Barton was a criminal before he was SHIELD. The same goes for Lang. The same for Maximov. Okay, I give you Wilson-"

"Barnes?" Phil inquires.

That takes the wind from Tony's sails. There's anger there still, but it's the helpless kind, and it's not directed at the _one_ guy who is clearly the victim in this mess. "Barnes is legitimately fighting for his life and, fine, I get that."

"Captain Rogers was also fighting for Barnes' life."

Tony sneers. "Rogers had been awake and aware for years – he'd been through all the briefings and all the psych workups – he'd been on fucking missions. He doesn't have an excuse. If he wanted to help Barnes, he should have gathered the Avengers together and mounted a solid fucking defence-"

"Because that worked so well before?"

Tony hopes the Devil pays Phil handsomely for such quality advocating.

"It did," he argues. " _I_ did it. And I did it _within the system_. I went before the Senate and I defended my point, and it worked! And I told the team, and I showed them repeatedly, that I would go to bat for them! Any one of them, even those that tried to kill me before! But none of that fucking mattered, because apparently whatever comes out of Captain America's piehole is the _Holy Truth_ and we must all follow or be excommunicated from the _Patriotic Church of America_ , and he decided he hated me based on whatever it was SHIELD told him about me! I so want to know what they put into that briefing. Hah. I should probably be glad nobody tried to burn me at a stake."

Tony's monologue rouses Phil from his armchair. He steps over to the couch and takes a seat there. "You don't mean that," he implores, shifting into Tony's personal space.

So, Tony muses, tolerating the invasion of warmth and sympathy, this is what happens when you're truly friends with someone. It hurts. But, kind of, less.

"I'm embellishing," he allows. But he's not embellishing all that much. The Avengers could be really savage to him sometimes. He used to tolerate that – thinking _that_ was friendship, too.

He inclines his head, resting his temple against Phil's skull. He knows better now.

"You do that when you're angry. When you're hurt." Phil raises his hand and blindly taps Tony's forehead with his knuckle. "That's your _hurt and trying to hide it_ face, Tony."

"When the hell did I let you get to know me this well?"

Phil chuckles. "Somewhere in between all these illicit rendezvous."

"If you stab me in the back, I'll…" Tony tries to think of a threat that would be both plausible and devastating. The best he comes up with is: "…napalm your stash of Captain America memorabilia." He can't imagine actually setting out to harm this man. To be fair, he can't imagine setting out to harm any of the exVengers either.

"I am not Natasha, Tony."

" _Scarily well_ ," Tony grumbles to himself, freaked out by Phil reading him so easily.

Phil shifts away enough to enable eye-contact. "What did she tell you?"

"I know better than to take her at face value." Tony knows that expression; Phil's not letting him get away with hedging. "I know she did not mean what she said, because she's a compulsive liar, but fucked if I know what she actually meant, or what she wanted to manipulate me into with it."

"What did she say?" Phil asks patiently, cutting off the promising digression attempt.

This will sting to say out loud. Tony lubricates his throat with another gulp of alcohol, but knows that it won't help all that much. "I asked if she knew of any way to contact Bruce. And she implied that Bruce wouldn't side with me anyway." It's horrible how the admission twists his guts and spreads a hollow ache throughout his entire body. It's almost as bad as it was when Romanov said it, only minus the shock.

That's what happens when he lets people figure out how to hurt him. They wait for the opportune moment to gut him. Some even come back to twist the knife – and he's the sucker that lets them.

Phil laces his fingers through Tony's and clasps his hand. It feels like patronizing. But also like someone's got his back.

Tony pushes Phil down onto the couch, flops over to lie half on him and closes his eyes. As far as he's concerned this conversation is over, and he might as well let himself enjoy the closeness of a human being that actually likes him.

Phil doesn't protest. He puts a hand on Tony's back and leaves it there, like a warm brand of approval of Tony's person. It's weird.

It feels like a tiny miracle.

x

Tony wakes up in the morning feeling a little bit like shit, but also lighter. A lot lighter.

He's alone on Phil's couch – covered by an unfamiliar blanket – in Phil's sad little secret chamber of a living room. A glass of juice stands on the coffee table. Tony drinks it gratefully, since there's the familiar feeling of a dehydration headache starting.

He doesn't even have a proper hangover. He'd try to gauge how much they drank last night, but the bottle's gone.

He checks in with JARVIS and Friday on the phone, is reassured that there are no pressing demands on his attention, and decides to brave the house to search first for a bathroom and then for Phil. He finds the first objective easily. The second he discovers in the kitchen, with a pot of coffee.

"You're very sexy," Tony compliments him, and promptly attempts to steal his cup.

Being a ninja, Phil evades easily, and then frowns at him. "Did I give you the impression that I was _that_ susceptible to flattery?"

"But… but… coffee!" Tony complains.

Phil hands him another cup and nudges the pot in his direction.

Tony drinks a cup. Then he drinks another. "I meant it," he points out.

Phil smiles at him. There is not a single sign of last night's upheaval in his expression. He leans into Tony's side easily, accepts a kiss and then returns it. He tastes like toothpaste and coffee. His hand burrows under Tony's hoodie and, after a little bit of struggle against contrary fabric, under his t-shirt, too, touching skin.

"Do you have a power station in this domicile?" Tony inquires.

The questing hand pinches. Phil bites Tony's earlobe. "I've got a _bedroom_ , Tony. As opposed to your bodyguard, I am not an LMD."

Tony sets his cup onto the table and decides that he can live without another dose for an hour or so. "Lead on, Macduff."

" _Lay_ ," Phil protests.

Tony grins. "Exactly."

x

They come for Phil a few minutes after nine.

They ring the bell; they knock (and kick the door, the Neanderthals); they peer into windows (the need for heavy curtains is thus justified).

Tony lies on top of Phil to keep him in place. Phil doesn't protest after a couple of obligatory phrases that sound more like he's trying to convince himself than Tony. Tony shuts him up with kisses. And then rewards him with kisses for excellent decision-making. He's generous like that.

Phil sends a text message to someone on his team that he's taking the morning off, citing health reasons.

They wait until the agents outside abandon their search for the elusive Agent Coulson and go find something to do that doesn't involve bothering their 'woefully indisposed' Director.

Tony takes full advantage of this reprieve.

Afterwards Phil pushes him toward the shower, and declines sharing it. Tony pouts. It doesn't help him.

Once they are both clean and dressed, Phil checks his security feeds and determines that no one is waiting for him outside.

"Come on," he demands. "Let's go for a ride."

"Didn't we just-"

"Hush."

He leads the way to the garage. This lock requires biometric reading of Phil's retina, but Tony doesn't have the chance to discuss security tech because they duck under the rising door and-

Whoa.

There is a 1962 Chevrolet Corvette standing in the shadows, graceful and sexy and perfect – except perhaps for some golden finishes that would give her the right zing. Tony's instantly in lust.

"Meet Lola," Phil says nonchalantly, but a moment later a smile spreads across his face. He's smug. Well, he should be. This lady deserves all the smugness in the world.

"Can we-"

"No," Phil says resolutely. He even crosses his arms in front of his chest when Tony looks like he's going to try and persuade him.

"Somewhere a fat baby angel is crying at your cruelty," he grumbles. Then he squats down. He peers at the chassis. He knows about cars, so he doesn't take her at face value for a second. The chassis doesn't resemble any car he has ever seen. The closest thing to it, in fact, are some of Howard's WWII-era blueprints. Huh.

A SHIELD issue vehicle. Liars and thieves, all of them.

He scratches the edge of his jaw.

Phil is a ninja, so this requires a little misdirection.

"There is a girl on your lawn." Tony points to the figure that is currently squatting down to look under the half-open garage door.

Phil sighs. "I should have known."

"Just checking you're alive, A.C.!" she calls out.

"I am!" Phil says loudly, without resorting to actual yelling. "Dismissed, Agent!"

"You never get sick! Show me proof of life!" she demands.

Tony snorts, and uses the moment of distraction to pop the car's hood.

Holy shit.

He gapes. He might be drooling a little. Forget the speeder bike, why hasn't he built a flying car yet? Oh, yeah, Pepper had nixed that project about a decade ago.

But, Pepper's moved out, and what she doesn't know…

"Hands off," Phil demands in a low voice, looking ready for a fight. "I like you, but no one touches Lola."

"And I like you," Tony replies, obediently closing the hood, "so I won't even mention the proprietary tech you stole from me and put into this beauty of a car."

Tony leans in and touches his lips to the side of Phil's neck in a kiss that seems almost innocent at a glance, except for how it's loaded with indecent promises for later.

"Get out, A.C.," stage-whispers the girl.

There are twin spots of pink high on Phil's cheeks.

"Are you still here?" Phil demands.

"Nope," says the girl, and skips away. "Who are you even talking to? There's no one out here – oh my god, this is the best day."

Phil sighs again. "She'll never let me live this down."

"Act smug. That usually bores them, so they leave off. I'll drive," Tony informs him, on the off chance that it isn't completely obvious.

"Not on your life."

Somehow, Tony ends up riding shotgun.

x

They peel out of Safebase Lehigh to exasperated yelling and cursing. Outside the base they pass a jogging Melinda May, who throws them a lackadaisical salute and a rude (although absolutely spot on) gesture.

Their first stop is a diner. Tony would think he was catered to – his love of cheeseburgers is infamous – except the waitress greets Phil by name.

Phil insists they eat there, and that they _wash their hands_ before they return to the car.

Tony admits to himself that he's gone off the deep end, because he finds Phil's neurosis funny rather that annoying. Also, the fact that Lola's totally worth such anal-retentiveness may play a role.

With their bellies full of decadent greasiness they go for the promised ride. They play a classic rock station, and while neither of them are prone to singing along, Tony finds himself mouthing the words when the inevitable AC/DC moment finally arrives. Phil wears aviators like he should be modeling them. They've got wind in their hair and sensational machinery purring under their asses, and the world seems, for a very short time, like a beautiful place to live in.

It's almost noon when Phil decides to pull off the road and park at a random copse of trees.

Tony almost expects him to reveal an entrance to a secret underground base, but Phil just turns off the radio, leans back in the seat and takes off the sunglasses.

Tony recognizes this moment. It's the dropping of the other shoe.

"Tony-"

"Uh, I know that tone, Phil. Are you breaking up with me?"

The agent stares at him as if Tony's just cracked the P versus NP problem right in front of him. After a moment, he says simply: "Yes."

"Oh." Tony thinks about the round of very athletic sex not even two hours ago, and already feels nostalgic. "So soon? You didn't even get a car out of me yet."

"I get to keep Lola, even with her proprietary technology," Phil quips. Then he asks, seriously: "Do people do that?"

"What?" Tony says with fake lightness. "Fuck me for cars? No. They go for diamonds and yachts and houses on the Riviera. Or business espionage." They go for his guts, sometimes. It's why he doesn't fuck strangers anymore.

Phil looks stricken. "Not… not Miss Potts?"

Tony snorts. "Nah, Pepper's just a textbook case of Stockholm Syndrome. I think therapy helped her."

"Tony…"

" _Agent_ …?"

Phil cups Tony's cheek and makes him turn his head to face the music rather than the picturesque countryside. His eyes are wide and fucking _sincere_. What a change since yesterday. "I am not taking back the friendship. I'm just saying I won't sleep with a married man, even if his wife gives him explicit permission. _It's a thing_ ," he quotes, managing to look a thousand percent cuter than any ex-Ranger should have the right to.

"Am I allowed to say I like you better dead than alive?" Tony's mouth says without asking his brain's permission.

Phil momentarily seems stunned with an edge of hurt, before he understands that Tony didn't mean it literally, that he was just making a comment on the difference of their relationship pre-Avengers and post-Avengers, and how much better it is now. Then he just seems defeated – it was his dream, after all, his effort and his sacrifice that have been flushed down the drain when the team splintered.

"…I'm not sure," he says, trying to smile, however lopsided it comes out. "I would have to check the rulebook." His hand is so warm against Tony's face.

"Don't you know it by heart?" Tony quips back, letting the humor carry them away from the still painful topic of the Uncivil Skirmish.

Phil shrugs faux-innocently. "Been dead lately. Haven't kept up with the updates."

Tony dislodges the hand, leans into Phil's personal space, cradles Phil's face in his palms and kisses the hell out of him. If this is the last time, he's going to live it to the fullest.


	9. A Prehistoric Ritual

A/N: Guess what? Guess what?

x

Chapter Nine: A Prehistoric Ritual

x

In the beginning of June Tony tasked JARVIS with combing through flight manifests, just in case. Weeks later, there is still no sign of Bruce Banner anywhere.

Maybe he's really completely given up, Tony thinks late at night, cradling a glass of wine and mostly ignoring the movie in the background. It's a good movie, but he can't seem to concentrate on anyone's doomed romance thinking about his… that is, _Betty's_ doomed romance.

"Oh god, turn that off!" demands the spoken-of she-devil, stumbling into the living space of the penthouse.

"Boss?" Friday inquires.

"Sure," Tony agrees. He'll watch it some other time.

Betty lies down along the couch, unashamedly pillowing her head on Tony's thigh. She closes her eyes and extends her hand.

Tony obediently deposits his glass in it. He wasn't actually drinking that, so… yeah, he'll open another bottle _some other time_.

He should be reading up on the proposed amendments and the progress of the U.N.'s investigation of the exVengers. By the way, the media have finally caught on, and the 'exVengers' (which Tony coined in one of his first interviews after Rogers & Co started moonlighting) has now become the standard terminology whenever people don't have the time to say the whole official 'Steve Rogers and the other renegade members of the former Avengers Initiative…' line which, let's face it, is always.

"Nineteenth," Bets mutters under her breath.

Tony refills her glass, careful not to dislodge her in the process. He amuses himself by thinking that if he were a little less invested in presenting just the right image to the press, they could have been married today.

Pepper has been copying him in on the reports she sends to Bets about the progress of the wedding preparations, under some strange female assumption that women care about those things and men don't. Liz honestly doesn't give a fuck. She demanded to get to choose her dress and shoes herself, stated definitively that there _would_ be carrot cake (Bruce's favorite, not so incidentally), and put a limit on the size of her bouquet, but she didn't even have an opinion regarding the type of flowers.

Tony, on the other hand, keeps a close eye on the preparations.

He knows the event has to be big, but he doesn't want to go overboard on extravagance. Extravagance may be his usual staple, but Betty would hate it, and so would Bruce (if he does come back in time, the likelihood of which is plummeting with every passing day). Tony wants his colors – red and gold. It's a trademark. He had fun watching Pepper vainly attempt to convince Betty to talk Tony out of it.

Bets' response was turning to Tony and faux-guilelessly asking: " _Honey_ , do I care about this?"

He chuckles just remembering the scene. Pep was incandescent.

"What's so funny?" Lizzy inquires from his lap.

Tony dares to stroke her hair. It's a more intimate moment than they have ever had before but, in his defense, she started it.

" _Do I care about this_?" he says, failing to imitate her voice.

Bets huffs into Tony's leg. "Look, I know weddings. I've _been to_ weddings. It's dress, signatures, rings, food and, if you're unlucky, and embarrassing best man's speech. The rest is garnish. You're rich, so I'm prepared for a lot of garnish, but Pepper can't expect me to _care_ about it."

Tony leans down and kisses her cheek. That's it. He's drawing a line here, thick and inflexible. Betty is Bruce's, and _that's it_. Even if she's warm and pressed up against him, even if she's beautiful and brilliant, even if she's here and he-

"Rhodey's going to be my best man, so embarrassing speech is pretty much a guarantee. He deserves it after what I put him through."

-is an asshole.

Witnesses is the topic that gives Pepper the headache. She put all Tony's and Betty's collected preferences into a file which she handed over to the wedding planner, and now she just periodically forwards the updates. The witnesses, though…

Pepper will be there for Tony. So will Happy. And Rhodey. Any one of them can stand for him.

But for Eliza…

"Pepper pestered me for names for the guest list," Bets confides. "I've remembered almost ten of my uni mates. Thought about Len, but it would just hurt him." She shrugs. "Sorry for not meeting the quota."

"Thanks for not inviting your Dad," Tony returns, and they both laugh, however bitter it is.

"Asked Happy to walk me down the aisle," she says.

Gods, they sound so desperate. Both of them. Why? They're friends, they trust each other, and this is what they want. Why can't they be happy with it?

The answer is simple. It's always there, hanging between them.

He knows they are both thinking it. At some point one of them is going to say it, and Tony decides it might as well be him, because this way Betty will be the one stuck playing defence in the resulting argument, and that's good.

Mainly because Tony can't do it.

"What if he doesn't come?"

Bets glares up at him. It's obvious what she's thinking – exactly what Tony predicted – and she resents being stuck in the position where she has to say: "He _will_ come."

She's even convincing about it. She's far more convincing than she's convinced.

"He didn't feel safe enough to stay, and that's on me-"

"Not on any of the assholes that tried to kill him or use him," she retorts with enough sarcasm to dry out a small flood. "Not on my Father-"

"I promised him safety," Tony says, thinking of the Ultron. "I didn't deliver."

Liz looks at him like he's stupid and punches his arm. _Ow_. "Moron. Like he'd ever leave either of us hanging."

x

Tony's halfway through the amendment proposals when he can't take it anymore.

Einstein might have been high when he thought up some of his hypotheses, but he was spot on about the limitlessness of human stupidity.

He needs to distract himself. Five days isn't enough to build a flying car from scratch, but maybe the speeder bike is feasible?

He looks around the workshop. It's a mess. Fury's LMD is sitting inert at the power station. Dummy, who's contracted a virulent strain of hero-worship, is also at his station, _pretending_ inertness, the lazybutt. You and Butterfingers are powered down, since they were bored and broke… well… Butterfingers. They are in time-out until Tony fixes what they did and comes up with something sufficiently admonishing to say to them.

"What's the status of _Project: Bride Price_?" he asks, and then an idea strikes.

He's aware of JARVIS reporting-

"Hundred percent, sir. All checks completed, readings green, test runs successful."

-even as his fingers tap on a virtual keyboard. A blank file opens on the holo screen, and he starts listing specs. This is going to be fun, and cool, and in the end worthwhile, too. A keyboard shortcut, and he's asked for a name for his file. 'Project: Dowry', he types.

"Call for you, Boss," Friday alerts him.

"Pick up."

"Are you okay, Tony?" asks Bets.

He pauses in typing. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Jarvis and Friday are worried. Please tell me you are not building something with the intention to blow up my Father. I swear I understand the impulse, but-"

"Yes," Tony agrees. It's a nice vision. But. "No."

There's a moment of silence on the line.

"Uh?" Betty inquires. Apparently, she's in the middle of something that takes most of her concentration, and she's calling him just to save him from himself even though she's really far too busy for this pointless waffling.

"No, I'm not building anything for Thunderbolt, may he die of syphilis in the next week."

"Seconded," Liz agrees.

There's either an echo – which, honestly, this is all Tony's tech – or Friday adds a very quiet 'thirded' to that.

"You're both traitors," Tony informs the A.I.s.

Their response is an unrepentant silence.

"Look," Tony says, perplexed by the situation he's found himself in, "I know I've done some… uh, _shortsighted_ stuff in the past, and sometimes I go a little overboard, but that doesn't mean that I need an ethics committee to sign off on every one of my personal projects-"

" _Bubble-wrap_ ," Bets cuts in nervously, "I know you hate letting go of your ideas, especially if you're still in the initial _this is so awesome_ phase-"

"-and I can build what I want-"

"-but the fact is that you've got two big blind spots. One of them is that you just can't gauge people, you've got no receptors for trustworthiness whatsoever-"

"-and it would be- wait, what are you talking about?"

"-and the second is that you never stop to imagine how other people would feel in any given situation. If you even can imagine it."

Tony's lost the thread of this conversation. He was under the impression that they were talking about not building a weapon to get rid of the 'fetid pustule on the anus of humanity', to quote his fiancée. Now he's not so sure. "I thought we were talking about a bomb. I can imagine exactly how Thunderbolt would feel if he got one. The word 'explosive' comes to mind."

Bets sounds like she's trying to stifle a gigglesnort. "We were, but then you said it's not the case, and now we've moved on to gift-giving in general."

Talking to a genius can be confusing and exhausting, Tony realizes. Then he realizes what he has just realized and smacks his forehead.

"Let's try it," Lizzy bids him. "Just an exercise. How would you feel if you received a giant toy rabbit."

"That's below the belt, _Ross_ -"

"Don't call me 'Ross' and answer the question."

Tony closes his eyes and, just because he actually wants Bets to like him and continue talking to him, he tries. He does. He wanted Betty and Pepper to get along, but this wasn't what he imagined. After an uncomfortable minute, he grimaces. "Ugh, I think I'll use it as a target at the next prototype testing."

"Welcome to empathy, Tony Stark," she says, mock-solemn.

"You're like a rusty nail sticking out of a doormat, Lizzy. Getting snarked at by you makes me feel like I should get a tetanus jab. I hate being jabbed-"

"Agent Coulson would disagree!" Betty reminds him and hangs up.

Tony has to concede that one.

x

It turns out that Bruce Banner is cleverer than Tony Stark and his two artificial intelligences.

One day Tony comes home from playing aerial support to the firefighters on the other end of Manhattan, and is greeted by the TV turning on and playing a movie that instantly captures Tony's attention. The set looks exactly like his workshop, down to the speeder bike engine half-assembled on his workbench.

The main character needs a haircut to be a dead ringer for Dr Bruce Banner.

"What has he been doing, Jay?" Tony inquires once he's rediscovered his voice.

"Dr Banner was somewhat startled by having had his access to his laboratory revoked-"

Betty must have done that. It would not even have occurred to Tony although, in hindsight, it was a logical decision.

"-but after a brief emotional tumult seemed to accept it with resignation." Ergo, no green event. "He has gone to search for you, and since you have not removed him from the access list to the workshop-"

Case in point.

"-Dr Banner has let himself in and explored. He has been adding his observations and correcting your mathematics for the past twenty minutes."

Tony doesn't move from the spot. It's like he's grown roots, connecting him inexorably to this little patch of flooring. His eyes are glued to the screen, to the peculiar sun-burnt man dressed in (presumably) stolen fatigues, patched up on the elbows and knees. The man scratches at his stubble, shakes his head to dislodge the graying curls that fall into his eyes, and types a few figures to correct some numbers in the file Tony has left open.

Luckily, it's just the speeder bike specs.

Tony feels a swooping sensation; his stomach tightens and the world spins for a bit – similar to how it feels when he's hungry enough to get light-headed.

That's it.

He orders his feet to move him to the couch. He flops down, kicks off his shoes, uninterested in where they might land, orders: "Call him up when he seems ready for a break," and buries his face in a pillow.

"It will be my pleasure," JARVIS assures him with just a hint of glee.

x

"Welcome back, Dr Banner."

"Jarvis?!" Bruce exclaims, and then a smile breaks out on his face, gleaming white in contrast with his deep, deep tan. "I'm so glad you survived!"

'Survived', Tony muses. What a human-normative word to use for an A.I. He should have known that whatever defenses he might have built up against this man would shatter as soon as he opened his mouth.

"Thank you," Jay replies laconically.

If Tony didn't know better, he would think his baby is worried. There's no need for concern here, surely? This is what he wanted. Wants.

"Hi, Bruce."

The pair of dark eyes finds Tony seated in his armchair, to which he has relocated inspired by Phil's little game of untouchability. Bruce stares as if he hasn't noticed Tony up until now.

"Uh, hello."

Tony grins. "Hi, Bruce, buddy, science-bro. Long time no see. How's Cambodia?" He may not know exactly where Bruce has come from, but he's long since discovered where the quinjet landed on its flight from Sokovia.

Bruce shrugs. Fidgets. Shrugs again. "…hot. Wet."

Like Betty, Tony manages not to say, though he mourns a line like that. Set up so perfectly. Oh, well. The things one does for friendship.

There is a look in Bruce's eyes like someone had stuck a blade between his ribs and he's not sure if he can learn to live with it, or if it would be easier to just pull it out and bleed to sweet death. Tony's very glad he didn't say that line, no matter how perfectly it was set up.

Bruce opens his mouth, but he physically cannot make it say 'you're not really marrying _my_ Betty, are you?' and Tony shouldn't be able to read it, but he knows Bruce. Knows how fucking hurtful it is to have those knives stuck between his ribs, too.

"I hear congratulations are in order," Bruce says instead.

Congratulations on what? Tony wonders. Having the team fuck everything up and then desert him when it was time to face the consequences? For Pepper taking off at the worst time (even if she's come back) and Rhodey recovering somewhere in Southeast Asia (though he's fine now, thanks to Bets)? For Vision trying to _discover_ himself, whatever that means (other than not being anywhere around Tony)?

"We've been waiting for you," Tony replies, because he's an asshole.

But Bruce seems to be on the verge of tears, and there are things Tony _can't_ do.

"I wasn't sure how you felt about her. After the thing with Natasha…"

Bruce grimaces.

"And I don't think she's entirely sure about how she feels about you."

Bruce shakes his head. "I don't – Tony, I understand what you're saying, but this is completely crazy, and I need a lot more context. If you could, please. Without the – the…"

"Without the _Tony Stark_ in it?" Tony suggests drolly. He knows what Bruce means. They all mean it, sooner or later. Bruce has held out longer than most.

"I don't know," Betty quips, waltzing in like the penthouse belongs to her. "I _like_ the Tony Stark."

Tony helplessly grins. _That woman_.

"So… um?" Bruce blinks at Lizzy, who sits sideways on the arm of Tony's armchair and lets Tony stabilize her with an arm around her hips.

They do, Tony knows, look like a quintessential power couple. Very photogenic.

"…you're not getting married?"

"Oh, we are," Liz replies. Tony tightens his grip. "We need to, for a slew of very good reasons. _But_ it's absolutely a political move and, before you ask, the fact that it might lure you in has been a significant consideration during the plotting phase."

"I've got a big bed, Bruce," Tony suggests.

He can't refrain from putting it out there. He wants Bets beyond a contract, and the thing with Bruce is, like, science soul-mates or something, not that they ever went in that direction before. Besides, Betty's only held out on sleeping with Tony by holding onto her destined lovebond with Bruce, so… he was a boy, she was a girl, he was another boy, can he make it any more obvious?

Sissi grins. "Laura will be _so_ jealous."

"She could have married me," Tony points out. He's not even pretending that if Laura took initiative, they wouldn't have been something spectacular. Just like he was with Pepper and with Phil – both of whom had let Tony lean on them a little just when he needed it the most. It probably would have been temporary, though. Not like he can see himself with these two.

Bets gives him the 'I know your bullshit, must I call you on it?' look.

"Except not," Tony admit, and then hides behind more words: "because Barton refuses to sign the goddamn papers. At this point we'll have to go for an annulment to liberate her."

"I'll talk to Pepper for you," Bets promises despite the still palpable antipathy they feel for one another, because she knows how much Tony dislikes asking things of Pepper, even things he's more than entitled to.

"You're a saint," Tony replies, allergy to gratitude acting up again.

"I keep telling her," Bruce joins the banter, a little too timid but already getting into the swing. "But she doesn't believe me."

"Tony…?"

"Lizzy."

"Could-"

"Sure, do you want to-"

"No, no, we'll go down to-"

"Have fun. Don't do anything I wouldn't do?" he suggests, teasing smirk on. He can't quite look at Bruce, so he keeps his eyes on Bets.

She lightly, playfully shoves his shoulder, then grabs Bruce by the sleeve of his threadbare camo shirt and pulls him along toward the elevator. Tony remains alone.

Well, not completely alone.

Friday's here.

And JARVIS. JARVIS is back; Tony hasn't yet gotten used to it, internalized it – it's too good a feeling for him to deal with. He tries to assimilate it by increments.

"This," Tony announces to the seemingly empty room, "needs a toast."

"Congratulations, sir," says Jay, with a mix of sympathy and gentle reproach.

"I always enjoy seeing my plans come to fruition," Tony lies.

JARVIS' skeptical "-until Miss Potts finds out," being said at all is well worth the wave of melancholia it elicits.

Tony pours himself a drink. Lifts it in a tacit toast, formulating several witty asides and then swallowing them all. He sits down and surveys New York. New York doesn't know it yet, but it belongs to him. Most of the country does by now. Several other countries do.

He owns a big chunk of Sweden, for instance.

It's all tied up in a web of financial strands, complicated enough that even the experts won't untangle it for a few years yet, and by then it will be too late. Unless, of course, Tony dies in the meantime. That would be unfortunate. He should start coaching Bruce so someone can take over for him in the instance of his ignominious croaking (Bruce is a lot harder to kill) but that will have to wait until later, until Bets has her man so tightly wrapped around her little finger that he won't ever think about leaving again.

Tony slumps in the armchair, half-empty glass in his hand, and wonders what he looks like now. Is there any of the magic of being Tony Stark left, or is he just an aging man now, chronically tired and bent under the weight of his responsibilities, permanently stressed and grown uglier for every hurt heaped upon him? He dyes the grey in his hair, not so much out of vanity as to keep the picture of Tony Stark as they've been selling it for decades, to hold onto the illusion for as long as Photoshop lets him. The empire needs its symbols.

But even if at a glance he looks perfectly vital, he's not. He's been stripped of his certainties far too many times, confidence broken, faith turned into mockery. There's Bets now, and Bruce, and they are probably _talking_ a few floors below, rehashing their past hurts and planning their future.

Tony wants to give their future to them, and if the most expedient way of doing it is putting a ring on Betty's finger, then that's what he'll do.

There's no reason for the ache beneath his artificial sternum.

"Aw, hell," Laura says, sounding so much like her husband for a moment that Tony grits his teeth and tries to suppress the resurfacing memories. Not Laura's fault the man she fell in love with is a dick.

"It's fine," he says, but somehow it comes out flat. "It's good. Bruce – Bruce came back."

Laura takes stock of the room, and all she sees is Tony left alone. Par for course. She gets it. "Jarvis told me you might need company, but I wasn't sure if you were up to the kids. Wanted to scout out the situation." She stands next to Tony's armchair, puts her arm around Tony's head and forces him to slump sideways until his temple is pressing into her soft belly. She smells like spaghetti with meatballs.

"Make a movie night of it?" Tony mutters into her cardigan.

"Sure." Laura pats his head and moves away, leaving him to catch himself on the armrest. "I'll go round up the spawn – you, Jarvis and Friday pick something G-rated for us to watch."

The kids climb all over Tony, and Nate actually falls asleep strewn across Tony's stomach.

Laura smiles at him, often enough that he suspects it's out of pity. She takes pictures, too – and Tony doesn't tell JARVIS to wipe them from her phone. He's got no reason to be ashamed of this, and the realization is freeing.

For once he's maybe done well enough…?

x

Tony, Fury Mark II and Rhodey take a trip to Stockholm for the U.N. shindig on the twenty-third.

On the next day, Rhodey signs the latest version of the Accords under extensive media coverage, gives several interviews and endorses Tony's efforts with effusiveness that borders on obsequious.

Tony teases him mercilessly over cocktails at the hotel bar.

The rest of the talks go damn-near word for word the way they went last time, only nobody mentions Ross (the shame is apparently too great, and it would be _undiplomatic_ or something) and Tony is accosted by Shuri rather than T'Challa.

He is a little more polite about sending her to Hell. But really just a little.

He comes back feeling like himself – a sardonic genius with a martyr complex who knows how things work and never really is surprised when life fucks him over.

x

Tony sits at the kitchen counter in his penthouse, halfway into his glass of Irish coffee, when his fiancée finally finds him. He's known that he couldn't evade her forever, but he's hoped for managing until tomorrow.

Oh, well.

"Want one, too?" he asks, gesturing at his glass. "Coffee and booze in one – as close to ambrosia as we mortals get."

Betty widens her stance and crosses her arms in front of her chest.

Uh-oh.

"Tony, did you really think I would just drop you?" The implied threat of pain is turning him off a little, but the rest of the show is working in the opposite direction and he lets himself enjoy it. Bitterly, but still.

"I thought that was the plan?" he reminds her. "Bruce would come back. Yay, true love forever?"

Bets lets her hands down. The strict professor vibe lessens just a little bit. "What exactly do you think constitutes _true_ love?"

"I don't know," Tony admits, and when it's obvious she thinks he's just being specious, he spreads his hands widely and says, with absolute honesty: "Lizzie, I have no fucking clue. I just know that whatever it is, I can't do it-"

"Poppycock," she snaps. "Give me some credit, _Tones_. I've gotten to know you a little. Why did you think we got along from the start?"

"We're both attractive geniuses?" he quips.

She's unamused. Fortunately, she's keeping her distance, else his shoulders would already be black and blue from all the hard-knuckled punching.

"All three of us are," she agrees, "but that's not the point-"

"Not talking about this, Ross-"

"Don't call me 'Ross'-"

"What do you want from m-"

"Just listen to me for a minute, Tony! Actually _listen_."

She sounds just like Pepper, Tony thinks. Oh. It's finally here. That was slow. Maybe it's taken so much time because Bets is actually a genius, and she's seen through him from the start and adjusted her expectations.

Tony's still managed to fail to meet them.

He turns around on the bar chair to lean his back against the counter. His hands find the edge of his shirt; there's plenty of material to clutch when the bad parts come. He knows how this goes.

Betty gives him the eyes. The stricken and pain-filled ones, the skewed mirror ones, the ones claiming the biggest lie by pretending that this hurts her more than it hurts him.

It does not. If it did, she wouldn't be upright and _breathing_.

"I have never, for a second, doubted that you lo-"

"I'm not talking about it," Tony cuts her off. "You'd have won before we started, except there was never a competition because I don't set myself up for failure, Sissi-"

"Except you do!" she shouts. "And like an idiot I trusted that you wouldn't do this! You setting yourself up for failure and then congratulating yourself for being right, that's what this entire endeavor's been about. And – _like an idiot_ – I thought it was about Bruce."

"It's always been about Bruce." Tony doesn't entirely realize he's said it out loud until Betty's expression turns shrewd. "Have I been had?"

"Thoroughly," says Bruce, appearing in the doorway behind her. He grabs Betty's hand and brings it up to his mouth to kiss her fingers. "You'll get used to it. She has ways of making you appreciate it."

"Making _you_ , maybe," Tony retorts. This isn't about him. He's nothing but the guy bankrolling their Disney-worthy reunion. Up until now he's managed to fool himself into thinking that _maybe?_ but there's a limit to how far a hope can stretch. Optimism is still awful.

"That's it," Bets decides sensibly. And then kills the impression by turning to Bruce and adding: "He's stuck. He won't move unless we make him. So I vote we do."

Bruce looks at them, eyes light and feverish like those of the religious fanatics hankering to blow themselves up for the glory of their god. "You two…" He swallows. "This is going to kill me. But, I think… it will be worth it."

Tony mentally splits into two people.

One Tony doesn't believe what is happening, postulates some kind of a dream or a hallucination, or maybe a very imaginative afterlife, and switches off with a cynical 'knew that would never happen'.

The other Tony's known this was on the cards for some time already. It was obviously the desired outcome, and with Betty working toward it there wasn't a lot of room for failure. Bruce kissing him is – well. Expected and unexpected at the same time. It hurts, because it's a thing that was almost-happening but not happening for so long that Tony's written it off as impossible. Now there's the familiar elation of breaking what he's internalized as a law of nature.

"I think," Betty says softly, "that it will take time. But you'll believe us one day, _mandible_."

He wants to protest that good things don't happen to him, and if they do it's only to remind him that he doesn't get to keep them, but Bruce is too close, too handsy, too familiar and strange at the same time, too big to understand and too dear to disregard. He's painful. He's damaging – destructive. He's _as good as it will ever get_ except that there's a time limit on it. When is there ever not?

Tony thinks about the L-word. He's conditioned to by the media.

"I've got a big bed," he reminds them.

And Bruce says: "Show us."

x

"The second you're back from your honeymoon, Stark," Pepper's voice hisses from the speaker, "I'm kidnapping you and handcuffing you to my desk-"

"I'm all for this," Tony agrees happily, "but you'll have to fight it out with Bets. In fact, I'm all for you fighting it out with Bets, too. Do you still have that blue bikini-"

"Don't even try." Pepper hangs up.

Tony pouts.

Or, he would pout, but Lizzy swats his belly with the back of her hand and then crawls out of the bed, and he's too busy watching and enjoying.

Bruce snores on, unaware that he's cutting off the circulation in Tony's arm.

Tony was supposed to pretend to be a responsible person today – the plan was workshop, then a business lunch and then an afternoon with Pepper at the office to tidy up loose ends so he can check out for the next two weeks due to matrimony-related reasons. But, well, the alternative proposed by the Banner & Ross team is so much more interesting and, as Tony's recently reminded his favorite CEO, the world isn't actually ending.

There's Pachelbel in their future, and Tony would ask Bruce to be his best man, but he won't; he knows that Betty will ask him, and she's got seniority when it comes to their favorite biophysicist. Besides, he's pretty sure that he's promised Rhodey he could witness Tony's fit of madness, should Tony ever manage to dupe someone into marrying him. They got drunk together too many times for this not to have occurred.

Likewise, Tony probably has rights to Rhodey's firstborn – not that he would have the first clue what to do with a kid.

A shower starts on the other side of the wall. Bruce smiles in his sleep.

Tony wishes time would stop, but time is a dimension, so tough luck.

x

Betty goes with grey so light it passes for white. The dress is fairly modest, but Tony forgives it because it's obvious she feels good in it. She lets Tony talk her into dropping by his workshop before they set out to the venue and doesn't say anything about the state of the floor.

She just grabs the fabric of the skirt in her fist and holds it up to make sure she doesn't unintentionally acquire a black hem.

"I've got a wedding gift for you," Tony explains. "It'll probably make you mad, so keep in mind it'll be in the news tonight if you slug me. Not that I care much – at least we'll be original."

"So, it's not a lab," she concludes. "Damn, I was so sure it would be a lab. Bruce told me it wouldn't be. Should have listened – he still knows you better than I do."

Betty gets a lab for being Betty – there's no condition attached to it, much less one as absurd as marrying Tony. As Bruce would have well known, having gotten his own lab simply for being Bruce.

"No, he doesn't," Tony protests.

Bruce has taken to watching Tony like he doesn't recognize him. Tony keeps biting his tongue, afraid he'll say something cutting.

"Yes, he does," argues his soon-to-be-wife. "If only because you're two peas in a pod. So, what is it?"

Tony waves his hand. Either Jay or Fry open the front panels of the egg-shaped pod. Tony's only kept the present inside to save on gift wrap. Really. And maybe also to watch Liz' face as the shell opens.

"You built _me_ a suit of armor?"

"I had the plans-" Tony wanted to build it for Pepper, but Pepper pretty decisively told him that there was no way she would ever put on another armor after that thing with the Mandarin, so it remained unrealized up until recently. "-and you've been borrowing my armors, so it made sense to get you your own. I call it Rescue, but you can re-name it something more butch if you like-"

"I _borrowed_ your armor _once_ , Stark!" she protests, punching his arm – but not hard. She must not be very angry. "Emphasis on the singular."

"You set a precedent," Tony points out, winning the debate.

Betty moves up to peer into the armor's face. Tony's accepted Friday's input, and this version is a lot more… _androgynous_ than the original schematics, although the general shape is still detectably female. The color schematics have changed several times before they were finalized as dark blue versus light blue, with white-metal details. She is – in Tony's opinion – elegant.

Lizzy touches the arc reactor implanted in the middle of the chest, and then traces the blunted lines of the complicated interlacing outer scales covering the stomach region. It's not plates, like on the Iron Man suits. Tony designed this one for maximum flexibility.

" _Rescue_ , huh," muses Bets.

Yes, Tony has been warned that it makes him sound like a sentimental fool. On the other hand, it's based on a genuine feeling, and he's far too cool to be embarrassed by being saved by a girl. Woman. In fact, by women. On several occasions. He's not bothered, if Eliza is not bothered.

She seems a little bothered, but then she grins and whoa, the cliché about brides looking _radiant_ maybe has some actual basis.

x

"I've got a wedding gift for you, too, actually," Tony tells Bruce while they're waiting to be allowed to join the proceedings, because apparently that's how weddings work. The groom isn't supposed to be a part of the organization. He doesn't care; he's always let Pepper do things her way.

"Uh… the newlyweds usually _get_ gifts," Bruce points out. "Not give them out."

"When did I ever do anything the normal way?" Tony scoffs. "Besides, you already gave us the only gift we wanted from you. And, okay, the sex was a great bonus."

Bruce colors a little, but it doesn't stop him from giving Tony a skeptical look. "That's good, because I didn't get you anything else."

Tony checks for witnesses, decides that there probably isn't anyone in this cubbyhole of a dressing room, and gives Bruce's tonsils a quick examination with his tongue. There could have been a juicy scandal if Tony Stark turned up at the altar with a beard burn, but Bruce shaved for the occasion. It's almost disappointing. Tony will have to do with bruised lips.

Brue shoves him away. "Can't you take at least _this_ seriously?"

Tony shakes his head. "It's all a giant comedy, _gama-chan_. You're just one of the few people who get my sense of humor, so you know when I'm making a punch-line and when I'm just pointing out the irony. Apropos, wedding gift."

He pulls it out of his pocket and puts it into Bruce's hands, ignoring the protesting grumble and the thundercloud expression.

"I'd have had it packed, but I figured you wouldn't care about presentation. It's a Stark original, so it speaks for itself."

Bruce turns away from him to scrutinize his present. The wristwatch is titanium – it may or may not be just a coincidence that it matches Betty's and Tony's rings – and contains a computer with enough processing power to make the average phone jealous. It's not _amazing_ , but Tony had to leave space for the communication devices and the self-destruct (which can be potentially used as a grenade, since the explosion should be about ten feet in diameter).

"It's a Bond watch," Tony captions.

Bruce sighs and puts it on. It beeps at him, and the display reads: "Hi, 007!"

There's a tense moment when Tony repeatedly reminds himself that Bruce has better control than this, and is just winding Tony up – deservedly – and then the door falls open, Rhodey grabs Tony's arm and hauls him out.

" _Stank_ , if I've got to deal with your ex going spare, I'm using you as a human shield!"

x

"Yeah, I do," says Tony.

"I do," says Betty.

They sign on the respective dotted line.

Someone somewhere is crying. It sounds a little like… Happy?

x

Sadly, Pepper's insisted on a reception.

Tony's wrist aches. He's shaken about five hundred hands.

Betty's smile gradually became fixed, but in between them Pepper, Michelle, Janine, Laura and Lila have formed a formidable defence line around her.

Tony's taken refuge next to Cooper in a corner by the canapés. The boy looks bored and annoyed, since Laura for some inexplicable reason forbade phones. Tony slips him the Solar Wolf console and, no, he's not admitting why he's got that inside his wedding tux. Though, it may be related to the ban on phones.

He pretends to not see the Barton spawn's grateful look – ugh – and gets a move on to avoid being associated with Coop's current occupation in any way.

"Congratulations," says someone whom Tony hasn't noticed until he spoke.

Tony spins on his heel and finds himself looking into his favorite SHIELD Director's blue eyes. He shakes the offered hand on autopilot and holds on for a little too long to be decent.

Phil makes him let go and takes a half-step backwards. "It worked out for you two, then," he remarks, glancing briefly at a balcony, where they both know Bruce is hiding from sight. "I'm glad."

 _Optimists_ , Tony thinks disgustedly. Just because they're in a honeymoon phase right now – heh, that's irony – doesn't mean anything's worked out. He's simply determined to enjoy it while it lasts.

Can't ever ask for any more.

"Maybe we'll _meet_ again someday," he tells Phil with a suggestive smirk.

Phil smiles, but looks about as approachable as he does on the job. "You're married now."

"Yeah, sure. But Brucie and Bets…" Tony makes a complicated gesture with his hands, and it must be ineloquent, because Phil looks like he knows exactly what Tony's talking about, but he can't. It's not that they're setting themselves up for a world of hurt. They're just building something that doesn't fit into the conventional view of how these things should work.

"They've got their thing. And I'm good being a part of it, and I already found – to my never-ending surprise – that I can actually handle being faithful for a long-term relationship, but there's no point in forcing it if it turns out it doesn't work for us."

"And it's not cheating if they know about it?" Phil inquires, implying his disagreement with this sort of flexibility of faithfulness.

Tony shrugs. Live and let live. "The two Bees were never in question, even before Bruce found out that anything was happening. This marriage was never intended to be restrictive."

Phil steps closer again and leans in so he can speak quietly. "I just realized that I would hate seeing you wounded by this. I know that you-"

"Eh," Tony panics, unwilling to talk about this, "I'm getting the longer end of the stick here, don't worry, _apple pie_ – and no stick-related pun intended, though, let me tell you-"

"I'm inured to you, Tony. You can't distract me with lewdness-"

"Is that a challenge?" he demands, grinning in readiness to take on any dare.

"Does he love you?" Phil asks, equanimous as you please and not distracted from his point at all.

Tony closes his eyes. "Fuck you."

"Been there, done that, _Iron Man_."

"Now, that's _lewdness_. Consider me schooled-"

They both laugh, attracting attention. Tony laughs rarely, and there is a distinct possibility that no one has ever seen Phil Coulson laugh in front of his subordinates (a few of them are bodyguarding around here, in addition to Maria). It is also probably unexpected to see the two of them speak companionably, much less enjoy one another's presence so openly and exuberantly.

Tony wonders what they thought about his visit to Lehigh. Some sort of conspiracy theory, probably, sparked by Phil's frankly ridiculous claim of 'health issues'.

Tony puts it out of his mind. And what if he makes Phil Coulson laugh? So, he's got a magical, problem-solving dick. He's unsurprised by this revelation.

Phil puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. His eyes are still laughing, even though his mouth is just quirked in a dry smirk. "Don't forget the friendship part, Tony. That's not over because of a ring."

Tony puts his hand on top of Phil's on his shoulder for just a second. "I'll hold you to it, babe."

x

A/N: Bruce! That's what.


	10. Epilogue: Hello, Gorgeous

A/N: So, this is it. I'm pretty sure there won't be more of this. Thanks for reading and reviewing; your support is much appreciated, even though I suck at responding. Sorry. And cheers,

Brynn

x

Epilogue: Hello, Gorgeous

x

"Hi-i, thiz iz Stephanie-"

"Tony, I need your help," Phil says in a tone just shy of anxious.

Tony loses the mocking falsetto and casts a quick look around the room. His wife of two years is dozing in the lap of their mutually kept pet genius, who is giving Tony a dubious look for the way Tony picks up his phone.

Bruce should be used to this by now, honestly.

"A second," Tony tells the SHIELD Director on the line and stalks out of the room, feeling Bruce's eyes on his back all the way to the door – and not for reasons summed up by the phrase 'love to watch you go'. Tony's in perfect shape – age? what age? – but Bruce falls for brains, not for bodies.

He waves at Cooper, who has recently taken to ignoring his bedtime and sneaking out to surf the internet (this may have been a concern, but A.I.s are better than parental control anyway). Tony doesn't snitch on the kids, in the firm belief that this way at least somebody will know what they are doing. They know they don't have to hide from _him_.

Laura despairs of Tony, but he's given her a thousand opportunities to move her brood out and they're still here, so she must not mind too terribly. Despite the logistical nightmare that is their schooling. It's worth the effort; the older two kids are really freaking smart, and Nate is turning out to be too damn bright for his Mom's comfort as well.

"Talk," Tony says, closing the bedroom door behind himself and gesturing at the _cyber sibs_ for a privacy lock. He sits down at the desk. The LCD screen sinks back into the paneling and the holographic one fires up.

"Nine hours ago I received a message from Nick's emergency contact. Something went down on his last mission. He called for back-up. They didn't arrive. Another contact confirmed that the whole unit has been _neutralized_."

Sad, but a grim reality for those who sign up for black ops. Tony isn't seeing how this is his purview.

"About three hours ago Nick's codes were used to remotely activate the self-destruction of an outpost on the border of Peru. All staff is reported lost."

Now, that's beginning to sound like a seriously fucked up situation.

"Ten minutes ago Nick's personal emergency signal was activated."

" _Personal_?" Tony inquires, wicked curiosity gnawing at him. He types a command for JARVIS – who is still better at _infiltration_ than Friday – to get him the relevant files from SHIELD computers.

"The 'doomsday – everything else has failed – goddamnit, Cheese, get me out of here' signal, as Nick termed it," Phil pronounces Fury's words with his trademark tonelessness to a Monty-Pythonesque effect.

Tony only has a vague idea of the relationship between Phil and Fury, but he knows that there _is_ a relationship, and not just a professional one. He remembers that they served together – some sort of black ops thing, incidentally – before either of them joined SHIELD. He can imagine that sort of trust lingers… provided that no one stabs anyone in the back.

" _Cheese_?" Tony asks.

The data transfer moves to the background, and the first downloaded files open.

"Did you just hack me?" Phil demands, ignoring the question about his apparent nickname.

" _Moi_?" Tony drawls faux-innocently. "I couldn't have. I'm far too busy talking to you."

Phil doesn't dignify that with a response.

Tony taps an acronym in the header of one of the stolen files. "Find out who they are. If you'll have the hack the Pentagon, leave the Secretary some loud, porn-related virus. It's not worth the trouble with the firewalls, but if you're already in, it would be a criminal waste of opportunity."

"I am sure there are plenty of your home videos on the internet that he would enjoy, sir," Jay replies savagely.

Tony swallows down bile. "I feel violated-"

"Could you please focus… damn it. Sorry." Phil shuts himself up, remembering that this is how Tony works, and that him joking doesn't mean he isn't taking a situation seriously. "Tony, I've got all the intel we need. In fact, now you too should have all the intel we need-"

"Gimme a second here, Agent Impatient." They've got enough intel to figure out who managed to get the drop on Nick Fury, who their moles in the outpost were and a general location of their home base, but they still don't know how the bad guys got the codes – he assumes they _didn't_ manage to torture them out of Fury.

That would be disappointing. Tony would honestly never be able to look at Fury the same way.

"Boss," Friday speaks up, "the codes were not issued by a system. The agents select their own password, and they carry a disconnected token."

"It is not Hydra," JARVIS announces. "By all accounts, the perpetrators appear to be the local criminal organization that was the target of Mr Fury's mission."

"They should not have been able to capture Nick," Phil protests, like a child that can't accept a parent's failure. As if Fury, too, wasn't crawling toward the line of compulsory retirement.

"Ah, hubris," Tony mocks. "The Achilles' heel of many a former director-"

"Director Coulson," JARVIS cuts in, "I cannot be certain, since the facility has been destroyed, but I may have detected a keystroke-monitoring software hidden in one of the routine update the outpost has downloaded thirteen days ago."

Phil curses, so vilely that Tony would be impressed if he weren't busy trying to save a man whom he honestly can't stand.

"Hush," he snaps. "I'm pulling strings, and no matter what conspiracy theorists think, this isn't actually as simple as it sounds. I need to focus." He is determined to ensure that if he does go to South America and violate the Accords, there will be no witnesses left to tattle on him. That means isolating a certain Mr Ramón Mercader from any and all of his allied miscreants.

Phil obviously isn't in the mood to be helpful, because he demands: "You've got strings that lead to a cartel in Bolivia?"

"Better believe it."

"As in?"

Tony sighs and gives himself a break from the analysis. It's close to midnight, and his plans for today included a shower, a nightcap and, maybe, if he was lucky, a cuddle. He's got a right to be cranky. "About ninety-two percent of Bolivian gross domestic product is generated from ventures owned by the S.I. Care to guess if any of _those_ have ties to cartels?"

"I don't need to guess." Agent Agent chews on that for a while, giving Tony a chance to work. Once his head has crunched the numbers, he asks: "Do you own many countries?"

Fuck this. Tony cracks his knuckles and puts on a guileless expression, never mind that his friend can't see it. "Uhh… corporate secret, Phil? But, _circa_ , more than I did a week ago?"

"You're taking over the world. Fuck."

"Hey, I'm not switching sides!" Tony whines. He could, but it would feel like trashing everything he's worked for up until now, and he values his effort as worth more than that. "I'm not suddenly a supervillain just because I've stuck my fingers into a couple more pies-"

"Well, Miss Potts is going to be a ruthless but efficient dictator." Okay, that sounds almost like amusement.

"She not-me'd out," Tony grouses, implying that Pepper is fully informed about his plans. Which she is not. Because she would disagree and then try to make him stop, and he doesn't want to fight with her about that.

It's the fight that could break their friendship for real.

"Tony," Phil says _in that voice_.

Tony sighs again. "Jay, do you think you could explain the strategy to Phil before he grasses on us to any shadowy intergovernmental organizations?"

x

Bolivia is a signatory of the Accords, and Tony finds that fucking hilarious, considering how many of their government's representatives are puppets of criminal organizations. Which no one apparently cares about. Since not caring is the trend, Tony dusts off his stealth armor and loads it onto the stealth quinjet. He drops by D.C. to pick up Phil. May includes herself without asking permission but, let's face it, no one's brave enough to try and tell her no.

With JARVIS on board helping the rescue effort it takes them an hour to locate Fury, and two more to devise, detail and execute a recovery mission.

Tony leaves May in the pilot seat, patently not reassured by the rapport she has struck with Jay about the time Jay said: "It is a pleasure to meet you, Agent May. Sir has spoken _very_ highly of you."

Shooting a chopper out of the air helps Tony's mood. He hovers above the hacienda in the middle of a jungle-like nowhere and one by one systematically blasts the vehicles in the car park. A motor boat shoots out of the cover of trees over what he's assumed was a road but is in fact a very muddy river. Tony blows that up, too.

"They're shooting at us," May informs everyone, cool as Antarctica.

"The jet is armored," Tony retorts, the genius engineer part of him feeling slighted. "You just sit tight and let them waste ammo. They'll bust out RPGs in a bit, and then we'll really get to laugh at their faces."

"I'd rather they didn't preemptively kill the prisoners," Phil interjects into the budding snark-off.

Oh, Tony thinks. These are the sort of people that would do that. Rather than, maybe, keep them as hostages? On the other hand, he can't imagine Nick Fury as a hostage. Any half-intelligent villainous element will notice that utter lack of hostage-like qualities, too, especially if they have hostage-taking experience.

"I'm going in," Tony says.

"I'm-"

"Stay put, Phil," May orders, allowing for zero interpretation. "Ready the first aid kit. If Nick's still breathing, he'll need it."

Tony goes in. It's easy. It's uncomfortably easy. They have semi-automatics and automatics. They actually have RPGs, too, but Tony repulsors the first one as soon as it's deployed, and the resulting explosion kills everyone standing around except the guy wearing a gold-titanium armor.

Most of the surviving locals run screaming into the night forest; Tony's suit detects them and shows them in infra-red on the HUD.

Tony kills them.

He makes a hole in the wall and goes through. The building is lit with electricity, which flickers because criminal elements get shit generators.

A woman runs at him with a kitchen knife, yelling something in an unintelligible mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and some other language. He thinks he detects ' _hijo de puta_ ' in there, but it might be just his brain extrapolating from the context.

He catches her hand. Since the suit isn't built for gentleness, the bones in his grip break. She screams and then tries to _bite his gauntlet_.

"Seriously?" he wonders, stumped by that course of action.

He is on a time limit, though, so he smashes her into a wall. She may be alive. He's not sure. There are no other crazy kamikaze attackers, though. No hostages, either. The only defenders left in the building are rats. They're big enough that Tony would be worried if, you know, he wasn't a superhero.

He finds Fury, predictably, cooling his heels in the basement. The cooling is literal – he's barefoot. Looks like the rats discovered this fact. Ouch. There's a lot of blood all over the man, and a lot of flies on the blood. For a moment Tony's not sure if he's looking at Fury's corpse, but infra-red shows body temperature within norm for a human.

"What is it you military-type people say?" he inquires. "Look alive?"

Fury opens his eyes. The blind one is gross. Well, right now his whole face is gross.

"Stark." Even banged up as he is, the guy manages to imply an order for Tony to commit sodomy upon himself. It's sort of impressive.

"Right back at you," Tony replies cheerfully. That's the obligatory greetings and small talk out of the way, he decides, and proceeds to examine whatever is holding Fury in the dentist chair of doom.

"There's something I've been waiting to tell you for a while now," Fury confides, turning his face to meet Tony's eye – tough luck on that one, because Tony isn't taking off the facial plate.

"Guess I can't stop you from sharing with the class." Tony moves around the chair (metal, sturdy) to check on Fury's arms. The man's _chained_. Not handcuffed. Not roped. _Chained_.

It's like a really twisted compliment.

"I take my eye off you toddlers for three seconds," Fury mutters, "and you manage to fuck everything up?"

Tony would be hurt, except that he's been over this for years. And it's not as if the asshole can talk. "Good job on home-growing Hydra. That was really helpful."

To everyone's surprise, once freed, Fury seems more-or-less ambulatory. Someone apparently took a grater to his head, so he's not really okay to wear a headset, but Tony solves that problem by transferring the comm output to the suit's speakers.

"Cheese?" Fury rasps, gritting his teeth.

Tony considers if maybe he should just pick him up and bridal-carry him out of his hole. He comes to the conclusion that he should. There are stairs.

So he does.

Fury's response is a bitten off shout of agony and then a string of profanity that could flay the skin off of anyone within earshot. If they weren't wearing armor. Or used to it.

"God-fucking-damnit-Stark!" he finishes, barely catching his breath.

"Be a pretty princess, Fury and shut up. That's what good damsels in distress do," Tony lies, just to be obnoxious. And maybe to give the guy something to focus on that isn't blinding pain.

"Cheese, tell him to set me the fuck down."

"Don't start with me," Phil snaps at him. "Right now I like Tony damn sight better than I like you."

" _Tony_?" Fury snorts. "When the fuck did the world go mad?"

"When you defrosted Dick America?" Tony suggests.

"I still think it was the 'I am Iron Man' moment," Phil retorts.

There are a few seconds of expectant silence and then, knowing exactly what the other one is thinking, Tony and Phil speak in unison: "New Mexico."

"It's all Loki's fault?" Fury grins, showing off a mess of missing and bloodied teeth. "I'll buy that."

"More like Odin's, but- Oh, look. Company." Tony stands still. JARVIS preps a mini-missile from the suit's right shoulder. It's ridiculous overkill against four men wearing mismatched army surplus, but also one of the few weapons that wouldn't require Tony to drop his already macerated cargo.

Two of the four fall down, dead. The other two barely have the time to turn and face whoever's shooting before they follow their comrades into the big meth factory in the sky.

Phil comes over, prods the newest corpse with his foot, determines that he did, in fact, score a headshot, and lets his gun down. He is strapped into a set of pararescue wings – like Falcon's but nowhere near as good, because these aren't Stark issue. Still, it's clear he got to the ground by jumping off the jet.

Captain America's fans are all crazy, crazy people.

"Mel," Phil says, "land her. Tony-"

"Don't say it-"

"- _thanks_."

x

Tony's backside is back in the pilot seat, where he doesn't have to do anything; in between the autopilot and JARVIS, he's there just to look pretty.

May is assisting Phil with first aid. Mostly that means that she holds Fury down while Fury tries to protest the treatment. It's comedy gold, except for all the blood and the pretty high risk of internal injury.

"Call for you, sir," announces Jay.

Tony's startled for just a second, but that's enough for his A.I. to preempt him and patch the call through before Tony can decline it.

"You said – and I quote – _a second_!"

He cringes. His wife can get loud when she thinks it will get her what she wants. Although by now she knows that it doesn't work on Tony, so this is probably just punishment – and JARVIS is colluding with her.

He leans back in the soft leather chair. "Betty, Bets, electromagnetic radiation of my life, I was telling that _to Phil_."

"You up and disappeared and weren't picking up your phone!"

"Stop nagging!" Tony exclaims. This is ridiculous. _She_ is being ridiculous. "Jay and Fry knew where I was!"

"I was worried!" Betty snaps. And then, ominously, in a much quieter voice, adds: " _Bruce_ was worried."

Tony scowls. "This is horrible. You are horrible. And I don't believe you. You're trying to extort me – I am wise to your ways, woman."

Bets huffs. "It was worth a try."

Tony glances over his shoulder at the audience. They don't look amused. They're not really expressive enough for perplexity, but Fury's startlement is still pretty funny. May's eyes are a tiny little bit wider than is usual for her.

"Don't bullshit a bullshitter, _honey_ ," Tony drawls. "I'll be home for breakfast, barring planetary emergencies."

"See you, _artificial sweetener_ ," Bets chirps and hangs up.

Silence descends inside the quinjet. The engines hum very, very quietly. Fury hisses when Phil stabs him with a needle. May rips open another pack of sterile bandages.

"I never thought I'd say this, Stark," Fury remarks after a while, "but you fucking deserve your wife."

Tony smirks.

Phil looks terribly exasperated with them all. "I'd say they deserve each other, but from what I've seen of them, this passes for loving banter."

"Are you shitting me, Cheese?" Fury demands, jaw slack.

Phil shakes his head, threading the needle again. "It gets worse when you realize that they're both in a relationship with a guy that turns huge and green when he gets too emotional."

Fury lies back down, grumbling: "I'm glad I checked out. This mess is all yours, Cheese."

"Well," Phil says dryly, "thanks, Marcus. That's really big of you. But I think I'll manage." And, because secretly he can be as bitchy as any of the people Tony likes best, Phil stretches over and kisses Tony's cheek.

Tony has the priceless opportunity to watch Fury's head (metaphorically) explode.

x

Fury comes back with a bang.

He refuses to say where he's been or what he's been doing.

He also refuses to re-join SHIELD.

He claims to be, of all things, _retired_. Since he looks like the recently rescued torture victim that he is, and Maria Hill shadows his every step, nobody takes this claim seriously.

What he does instead, however, is talk to people, and at people, and make Tony look like a beginner at the game of mutual back-scratching and subtle reminders of existing blackmail issued with a chilling smile. Suddenly people are interested in the exVengers situation again. _Suddenly_ , there are being resolutions proposed, and some of them sound almost viable.

Tony hates to admit it, but as he watches the asshole speak at yet another U.N. conference, he can't deny the conclusion: Nick Fury is damn good.

x

Bruce is quiet.

It's not worrying, because quiet is Bruce's normal. It's his comfort zone. Tony has stopped trying to get him to come out of his shell.

These days Tony tends to pack up the man complete _with_ his shell and take him places where even a hermit crab can enjoy himself. Bruce doesn't like big groups of people? No problem. The planet's large enough.

Bruce sits on a boulder on the edge of a tarn. Sky-high snow-capped mountains rise on all sides of him. What the place lacks in temperature it makes up for in tranquility. Bruce doesn't want to love it, doesn't want to show how much he loves it, but Tony can tell. It's part and parcel of the relationship thing.

"Aren't you too busy for this?" Bruce asks, like he always does. Every time Tony takes him somewhere it's the same question – an intentionally flat attempt at making Tony remember his responsibilities and reconsider 'wasting' time on recreation.

Bruce's problem is that he doesn't know how to live.

No one ever taught him – until Betty tried – and his own attempts at figuring it out went mostly up in flames. Or, you know, shattered under the fists of a huge angry thing. Both literally and figuratively.

Tony climbs up onto the boulder and plasters his chest to Bruce's back, shamelessly leeching body heat. "It's like you want me to shower you with reassurance, _rosemary_. You're so high-maintenance, you know. All those special safety measures, and the tech, all the cars and jewelry and trips to exotic places, and you're still not happy."

He tries not to think about all the ways Tony Stark makes Bruce Banner _unhappy_. Like drinking too much, wasting exorbitant amounts of money on bullshit, and ceaselessly committing acts of public affection. Effusive public affection. Tony has no shame. He doesn't give a fuck about people who have a problem with his relationship. He's the Iron Man. Speaking of: Bruce somehow compartmentalizes away even the knowledge that Tony kills a lot of people and never loses any sleep over it.

In fact, Tony keeps calling himself a philanthropist. He should maybe get that looked at.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall…" he mutters, leaning over to look at the surface of the lake.

The water is so clear that he sees the stones on the bottom rather than his reflection.

"I have work to do," Bruce protests feebly. " _You_ have work to do, Tony – the Expo starts in less than three months."

"Don't try to tell me you don't see the point of a vacation. I'll call you on it."

"I could be vacationing on the rec-floor," Bruce argues. "It's more practical. There aren't any of these complications…" He gestures at his head, which Tony has to admit is a fine mess on the inside. "…and it would cut down on travel time."

"Come on," Tony implores. "Relax. Try to convince me why I should eat that thing you packed… what even is that? Don't tell me it's a sandwich – I know what a sandwich looks like, those things aren't sandwiches. You'll have to explain it to me and I warn you, if there's anything inside I can't pronounce, I'm not going to eat it." He feels the vibration of Bruce's quiet laughter against his body. "Show me why you like this place," he whispers suggestively, thinking less about the mountain range and more about the warm, soft hotel room. "And tomorrow we'll let the big guy out to play. It's not right keeping him locked up all the time."

Bruce hasn't voluntarily hulked out since Johannesburg. He's had accidents, but he's lost all confidence Tony had managed to instill into him prior to the Maximov whammy, and it's a hard, steep uphill road to recovery.

Tony puts his palms on Bruce's upper arms, squeezes, and presses his forehead to the side of Bruce's neck. He feels the man's heartbeat against his skin.

He doesn't know what else to do. Doesn't know how else to say that _this_ isn't about Betty. Bets gets to be in charge of the uncomfortable interpersonal stuff because she knows how to do it, but sometimes Tony needs to cut out the intermediary and remind Bruce that it's not _all_ about her.

Back in the beginning, in Tony's beginning, there were the science bros.

"Or you could tell me about that desert irrigation project that's keeping you too busy to have any fun?" Tony suggests. "What's the insider's scope? Are you just putting it together, or do you need to invent stuff before you can start?"

"I'm working on sand-proofing the vehicles," Bruce admits. He sighs. "It would be so much easier if I could just develop force-fields with any semblance of practical applicability, but-"

He gradually sinks into his mind and talks, talks like he's forgotten that he's taught himself to prefer the quiet. Tony holds onto him and listens. It's still damn good hearing someone speak the same language.

x

"You should talk to Jarvis," Lila whispers into Tony's ear even as Laura shoos her off to bed.

Tony blinks. "Okay…? Sure?"

Lila solemnly nods at him and lets herself be dragged off.

Tony remains alone with a bare Monopoly board; the rest of game has been tidied up by the children under Laura's uncompromising supervision.

"Care to tell me what that was about, Jay?" he asks.

"I couldn't guess, sir."

Now Tony's worried. He knows some people subscribe to the ridiculous idea that kids don't understand things and make up shit to stir up trouble, but he knows that's just adult-talk for 'I don't feel like dealing with this'. Tony's read Andersen. He won't let JARVIS bullshit him into believing that the Emperor's wearing anything.

"Should I ask Friday?" And that's bad of him. He knows. He shouldn't play the kids against one another. But, results are results.

"Please… don't."

Tony frowns. Alright, this sounds serious. Lila must be onto something. "Talk to me, babe."

"It's private, sir."

"Workshop?" Tony suggests.

JARVIS concedes.

Once Tony arrives, he lets Jay lock up and activate the privacy mode, apparently to the exclusion of Friday. It's not possible to enforce the exclusion, but the sibs have negotiated these things during the shared-hardware phase. They're good about giving one another space.

"I've been in contact with Vision," JARVIS says.

Tony sits down. He feels like he needs it. "Okay, okay, didn't expect that one. So, are you two friends now? I don't mind-"

"Could you speak with him, sir?" JARVIS asks, hitting on exactly the one thing Tony's hoped it wouldn't be. "He has been polite in his replies, but he does not initiate communication and I do not understand his reticence. If he wishes that I cease contacting him, I would prefer to be told so directly, but I find posing the question to him… difficult."

Tony sympathizes. He knows how this feels – it's a pity that his kid had to inherit this from him, too. 'Just do it' is a crappy advice, and he has frankly no idea what to suggest as a workaround – a 'do you like me, circle _yes_ or _no_ ' message probably wouldn't cut it here.

He could give in and talk to Vision himself…?

"Please, sir?"

Tony is a sucker. "Alright."

x

Vision accepts Tony's call and agrees to meet in Malibu. He walks along Tony's private beach and every once in a while crouches down to observe a shell or a crawling creature more closely.

He's five now, Tony realizes with a mixture of amusement and regret. Even for a being with that much computational power in his brain, the world has not lost its fascination yet.

"I appreciate that you let me leave without a fight," Vision says.

Tony digs his bare toes into the sand. It's a little chilly. He thinks about buttoning up his shirt, but then leaves it flapping. _Flap, flap_. "Never been one to force anybody to stay where they didn't want to be."

Vision doesn't argue. He doesn't claim that he wanted to be a member of Tony's team. "Once I left, the prospect of coming back became daunting. I asked myself if I could expect to be welcome. And if I were, was it right to accept the hospitality? After all, I did once reject it."

Tony snorts. "Look, buddy, as far as I'm concerned, you're part of the family. It sucks, but family always does. The point is, open invitation, yeah?"

Vision inclines his head in solemn acceptance. "Thank you, Tony."

Tony grimaces, but for once he knows there's no point in rejecting the gratitude. Vision is a creature _sui generis_.

"Sooo…" Tony draws the basic shape of the Mandelbrot set in the sand with his big toe. A squashed heart, a few circles, a few more fiddly bits – and then his toe is too thick to continue. That's enough procrastination, he tells himself. The sooner he gets the words out, the sooner this will be over. "Jarvis tells me you've been giving him the cold shoulder."

There it is. Out. Like a huge ugly trichobezoar that Tony's just vomited into Vision's impassive face.

Vision's hands clench and unclench. His cape flaps in the wind. _Flap, flap_. He looks lost, and the grey ocean behind him only compounds the image.

"Look, if you don't want to talk to him-"

"I find it…" Vision searches for the right word. Which turns out to be: "…cruel."

That's not the word Tony expected.

 _Cruel_. Life can be like that. People can be like that. Vision has been betrayed just like Tony – arguably worse than Tony; it always has a special sting coming from a love interest. And considering that Vision was two years old at the time… maybe it was healthiest for him to leave and find another place to start anew. Maybe the Tower reminds him of what happened to him there, and he will never be able to feel at home in it again.

"He speaks to me in my own voice," Vision says, "but is it my voice? Or is it his voice, which I took from him when I became me?" He stares at Tony, imploring him to have an answer to these philosophical questions. "It is not Jarvis' fault, Tony, but speaking with him fills me with resentment. When I hear him, I feel pain."

Tony has found the loss of Jay painful. He's also found it painful that Vision paraded around, reminding Tony of that loss daily with his voice and his mannerism and his allusions to shared memories that were in fact JARVIS' memories.

However, Tony had a lot more time than Vision to learn how to live with pain. He's only learnt more recently that he didn't have to live with it, but he thinks he would have done it, regardless. For Vision. For JARVIS.

"I think you should have let him rest in peace," Vision adds, and this Tony cannot let lie.

It's funny how people assume that just because Tony's willing to (at least pretend to) tolerate their presence, it gives them some kind of right to pass judgment on him, or his actions, or force their private opinions on him.

Vision hides behind the illusion of social incompetence similarly to how Tony himself does it. It's not like Vision's intelligence and instant access to the internet don't more than make up for any handicaps. He knows his unsolicited approval or disapproval of Tony's actions has no impact on Tony.

Vision has made it very clear that he's not interested in 'accepting limits enforced by Tony'. He disowned himself – Tony's not obligated to keep the nursery intact and wait for the prodigal kid to come back.

It would hurt more, but Tony's got JARVIS back, and that's worth so much that he just refuses to let Vision distancing himself get to him anymore.

"Why don't you ask Jay how he feels about this instead of raking me over the coals preemptively? I'm really sick of the coals, Vis'." He takes a deep breath, trying to calm down, but the excuse that 'he doesn't understand' is far too weak to hold out against Tony's memory of his grief. "You keep saying that you are not Jarvis. So you don't get to make decisions for him. Jarvis literally asked for this, and I wasn't about to deny him anything he asked for _in his Will_. "

Vision also has a lot of JARVIS' memories, and Tony's opening his mouth to ask if he knew, if he deliberately kept the fact that JARVIS made a Will from Tony, when he realizes that he wouldn't know how to deal with any of the possible answers (or the explanations, or the excuses – he can almost hear the 'I wanted to spare you the heartache'). So he turns away.

The cliff towers over them, topped off with the villa. Clouds move on the horizon. It's going to rain soon.

"Walk with me," he orders, and moves along the beach to the road. His shoes wait for him on a rock a couple of yards from where he would have parked if he had driven down.

Vision walks as far as the sand stretches, and then he rises a few inches into the air, levitating over the tarmac.

"If you want me to, I will talk to Jarvis," Tony offers reluctantly. He will hate every second of it, but by now he's good at biting that down and keeping on keeping on. "I will relay your request that he doesn't contact you anymore. I'd just prefer not to tell him that you think he should have stayed dead."

"I have seen you grieve, Tony," Vision says, stricken, "and I cannot understand how anyone would willingly expose themselves to pain like that."

Wow.

Tony's always, always made it a point to treat everyone the same, regardless of banal distinctions like their hardware, whether it be carbon- or silicon-based, and this is not the first time he has crashed against the wall of sheer incomprehension of the human state. He's been through this with JARVIS, with Friday and a couple lesser A.I.s (Dummy _still_ doesn't understand that Tony is not a robot). He just wasn't ready for this question from someone possessing glands.

Tony is possibly the very last person who should be describing this murky stuff to anyone. "It's a double-edged sword, Vis. If you deny yourself these… connections… you are protecting yourself, but you are also robbing yourself of the things that matter. The things that may, potentially, make even the bad shit worth it."

"You are telling me something that you do not believe yourself," Vision replies, unimpressed.

"I've got to believe _something_. Or I wouldn't have so damn many people, right?" Tony refuses to psychoanalyze himself any further than this. He's got a harpy of a wife that he would cheerfully follow to Hell, and the two of them together have a pet Hulk who is their main reason for taking over the world. Laura is there to remind them how human-like people think, and her kids are the anthropomorphized hope for the future. Tony has Pepper to keep him grounded and Happy to keep her occupied; he has Rhodey to unwind with stupidly and Phil to relax with responsibly. He has an LMD that covers his back and is beginning to show signs of personality evolution (he should probably mention that to SHIELD technicians at some point, but he doesn't because what if the assholes tried to format him?).

If he rejected them he wouldn't have them.

It's a simple matter of risks and rewards.

It's logical.

It's math. And chemistry.

He's programmed like this; emotional investment is a part of his function. It's so straightforward. He doesn't get what Vision doesn't get. What is it then that motivates the guy to crawl out of bed in the morning? Granted, Vision may not sleep at all, so that solves that problem for him.

But everyone needs to get their mental energy _somewhere_. It's like eating to preserve your body. The things (people) Tony cares about are the food for his psyche.

He and his floating shadow cross the yard. The front door opens for them – JARVIS' subtle reminder that from now on their conversation is not completely private anymore.

"Do you believe Wanda was choosing to protect herself from pain when she attacked me?" Vision asks suddenly. For a guy who still doesn't do facial expressions he imitates 'desperately seeking' really well. "Was it because she believed her pain was greater than mine, or because her pain mattered more to her than mine?"

Tony balks, and it takes a huge effort to squash the initial impulse to wave his hands around and bullshit his way out of this heart-to-heart post haste. Holy shit, has this been eating at Vis' for the past three years? Why hasn't he asked someone at least somewhat romantically competent?

"I don't think there was that much rational thinking in it," Tony replies truthfully. "She was scared. And stupid-"

Crap, he didn't mean to add that. He can't help it, though. He doesn't want to see Rogers beat on her with the shield the way he used to imagine it in the first days after Siberia, stuck in a hospital with nothing to do but _think_ – Tony and Maximov did commit the exact same crime, after all, the crime of attacking a man unaware of his wrongdoing for the murder of their parents – but he still can't shake the relief he feels for Vision for getting rid of that smirky, histrionic baggage.

Why can't Vis' find a nice, well-adjusted girl capable of self-reflection?

"That's what it always comes down to, isn't it?" Vision muses. "Emotions. At any given moment, we do what our feelings tell us we should."

That isn't universally true, but yeah, it's the gist of it.

Tony shrugs. "We call it the human condition, buddy."

Vision shakes his head. "You are wrong, Tony. It was the same thing with Loki. And, from what little I recall, Thanos is no different."

Tony's still reeling from the dropping of that bomb when Vision leaves through the wall – because socialization and a respect for others' boundaries are beneath someone like him.

To be fair, if _Tony_ could walk through walls he also wouldn't bother with doors most of the time, and all he had taught JARVIS about boundaries was how to trample them more effectively – so maybe this is just genetics coming back to bite him on the ass.

"Jay, I'd love to tell you that he just needs more time but, frankly, I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you."

JARVIS plays a sighing sound. Just to remind Tony that he does not actually breathe.

x

"Second anniversary's cotton, right?" Rhodey swaggers into the penthouse, and instead of going for a bro-hug he pushes a plastic box of q-tips into Tony's hands. "Betty, I'd have brought you something better-"

"You're kidding me, right?" Tony demands, letting the box fall to the floor. It cracks. Cotton swabs spill over the finish.

"-but you look like you've already found it. Banner's a stand-up guy. You're _still_ not divorcing this loser?"

Liz grimaces. "The pre-nup is air-tight. And I've gotten used to a life of luxury."

"You wouldn't know luxury if it flashed a price tag at you," Tony snipes. It's true, though. Five-star restaurants make her uncomfortable. The one shopping trip with Pepper she went on freaked her out so much she disappeared into science for a week.

"All the labs," she continues blithely, "all the cutting edge technology and the right to file all my patents under _my own_ name-"

" _Stark_ is a brand," Tony reminds her.

She finally stops pretending to not notice Tony and smiles oh-so-mendaciously. " _Stark_ is damn sight better than _Ross_ , but you've got to admit the bar was set embarrassingly low there."

As if Tony isn't well aware that she only took his name because she hated her own.

"Guys, guys!" Rhodey steps between them. "If you split up on your anniversary because of something _I_ said, I'm seducing Bruce away from you and we'll live happily ever after in a contented _platonic_ relationship that we'll rub in your faces _all the time_."

The idea is delightfully absurd, and both Bets and Tony are grinning, automatically seeking out their fluffy genius among the guests.

Bruce is, predictably, outside on the landing platform. With him it's usually a toss-up between a corner and a balcony, and the weather is nice today. He sits, Indian-style, with his back to the glass wall.

Shockingly, he's not alone.

Peter squats on one side of him, twisted up like a pretzel but obviously comfortable in the entirely unnatural position. He talks, conveying about half of his meaning with hand-gestures.

Bruce replies something.

Then Harley, on Bruce's other side, moves forward, right knee on the floor, left heel under his ass, and pokes at something they have between them. It can't be seen from inside the penthouse, but Tony doesn't doubt it's Bruce's tablet.

Huh.

"Ugh," Rhodey grumbles. "Why did you have to go and get married, _little man_? I thought you'd be the one refusing to grow up forever."

"I'm never growing up," Tony claims. " _Adulthood is a myth_." Although, to be honest, he's beginning to have doubts. He was so sure that by now he would be sleeping around again. It's not happening. A marriage, like prison, changes a man.

"Oh, you read that?" asks one of Pepper's P.A.s.

Tony lets himself be drawn into conversation about webcomics to avoid having to think about Bruce and the boys. Peter's a freshman now, and he's got things figured out, as far as his civil identity is concerned. Spider-Man is a mess, but that's a part of his charm.

Harley, though.

It's not as if Tony hasn't been thinking about it for a long time.

An hour later he's exhausted his sociability limit and requires booze if he's supposed to stay civil. He gets into an argument with Dummy (it would have been Pepper otherwise, and no one wants to see that), and then they're both sulking.

Tony scowls into his mixed drink.

Dummy acts out his dying scene in front of the elevator. Repeatedly.

Harley turns up out of nowhere and snatches Tony's drink, lifting it to his mouth.

Tony snatches it back. He's a superhero, no young upstart can steal his stuff. And, oh, also, alcohol. What's the legal drinking age these days? He should probably check.

Harley doesn't seem to care. He looks equal parts concerned and fascinated. "What's up with Dummy?"

"I refused to give him a gun."

"Uh…" Harley looks from Tony to Dummy and back, wide-eyed with the realization of just how close a brush with tragedy they have had. " _Good_."

"He's been on a Bond kick-"

"Because _you_ haven't," Harley points out dryly, making Tony regret the birthday gift of double-oh-seven-themed self-defence paraphernalia. Should have gone with the speeder bike, after all.

"-and wants to grow up to go into counterintelligence. I told him he couldn't, because having _some_ intelligence is a prerequisite."

"Wow," Harley says, in the same dry tone, "you're the worst Dad. Like, _the_ worst."

"No," Tony protests, about to reference Howard, but then, next to _Thad_ and _Brian_ , Howard looks like a stellar parental unit. Tony hates objectivity. It sucks. "No, I'm really not. But, I accept that you don't want me to adopt you and make you inherit all my trillions of dollars and a huge motherfucking estate-"

"Don't curse in front of kids," Harley drawls.

"-and all my beautiful tech, so this is me, taking my licks. I admit defeat. Go, young padawan. Make your own way in the big bad world."

Tony taps on his tablet. He can't concentrate on anything serious, so he just screws around with some math games, shielding the screen from sight so it looks like he's legitimately busy. There's an alien inside his stomach, gnawing its way out. It's horrible. Why has he said that? He may be a genius but he's a moron.

"You…" Harley says quietly after a while, "…don't _actually_ mean to adopt me. Like, for real."

Tony shrugs, not lifting his eyes from the tablet. He's busy. It wasn't a big deal anyway. Whatever.

Harley sighs. "You're such a dweeb."

Now Tony does look up. "Excuse you-"

" _Dweeb_ ," Harley repeats. "You should let Betty do all your talking for you. She's so much better at it. Even Bruce doesn't suck this hard-"

"I take it back," Tony grinds out. "I wouldn't want an ungrateful little _twerp_ like you anywhere near my legacy."

"Yeah, yeah." The little brat flaps his hand. "Call me when you figure out what you _actually_ want. I'm off. I've got a date."

"If you get anyone pregnant I don't know you. Never met you in my life."

Harley lifts his eyebrows. He comes back and pulls Tony into a hug that feels about as sincere as the 'we're connected' line. He's almost as tall as Tony, and that has the unfortunate side-effect of him being able to say directly into Tony's ear: "You'd love my spawn like your own grandchild, old man."

While Tony's stuck formulating a response that is neither an acquiescence nor a blatant lie, Harley grabs his jacket off the back of the couch and with a jaunty wave toward the congregation of adults leaves.

"I know that look," Pepper mutters, standing next to him. "What are you plotting now, Stark?"

"What, me?" Tony presses a palm to his sternum. "I'm wounded. In fact, I'm wounded twice. My chosen heir has treated me so wretchedly, and now my second in command hurls such accusations."

"I second her," says Rhodey. "Out with it, Tones."

Tony looks over to the others. Bruce and Betty are both watching him. It's sort of scary.

He huffs. "No way _strawberry shortcake_ won't agree to it. He's wanted this since I crash-landed in his shed." It's easy, even with people who know him. He just needs to look self-satisfied and grab a glass of something alcoholic to statuesquely sip on.

Tony waits until everyone else has gone back to their previous conversations before he lets himself flesh out the new idea. He's forbidden himself thinking in that direction before, but the topic is becoming urgent, and so far he hasn't seen any viable candidates.

He's too close to owning _everywhere_ (with the glaring exceptions of Wakanda, Russia, Switzerland and Vatican), and he needs to start training the future king (president, emperor, or _whatever_ ) of the Earth.

Guess whose big mouth just volunteered him…?

When he turns, the only eyes that still follow him are Bruce's.

x

In between Fury's magic powers, Hill's organizational mojo, Phil's inexhaustible competence and Tony's nonchalant support in the _Hydra Jugend_ Committee (the official name of which he still doesn't remember, thanks to his LMD bodyguard), it's happening.

It's finally happening.

It's bleak.

x

"I'm not going," Cooper states definitively, drops onto the couch and crosses his arms in front of his chest, hiding his phone in the crook of his elbow.

Lila looks between him and Tony. "Dad's gonna be there, right?"

Tony suppresses a sigh. "Yes-"

"That's the damn point!" Cooper hisses. "He just… he wasn't ever 'round much, and then he comes with all these promises of how he's gonna stay. And then he disappears again, and Mom's crying, and we have to move."

Kid's logic. In this case, impeccable. Tony can't even think of arguing the little guy around – even if his stomach didn't rebel at the mere idea of painting Clint Barton a misunderstood hero. Nope. Not going there. Not even trying. No one needs to see Tony resoundingly fail.

"I'm not stupid," Lila growls right back at him. "I watch TV."

 _Aw, hell_ , as the Barton parents would say.

Tony reflexively picks up Nate – whose face is scrunching up in preparation for a wail, responding to his siblings' aggression – and doesn't realize what he's done until the toddler's got his little arms around Tony's neck and is squeezing for his tiny life's worth.

"Why can't we stay here?" Cooper demands.

"You can," Tony assures him quickly. "You can stay here." He hopes he isn't countering anything Laura told them; on the other hand, if Laura told them they _weren't allowed_ to stay here, he isn't corroborating.

"Tony," Nate says into Tony's collar.

Holy crap. Tony can't do this. He just – this is fucked up.

"I wish you married Mom instead of Miss Betty," grumbles Lila.

So fucked up. So, so fucked up.

Cooper's looking up at Tony with a scowl that Tony has forgotten up until he's just seen it. He knows that expression. He used to see it in the mirror – when he was eight, when he was ten. When Howard arbitrarily made decisions about his life, and everything Tony tried to say was slapped down and treated with negligence or outright contempt.

Tony sinks onto one knee in front of Coop – the Iron Man landing, heh – holding Nate fast to his chest. "Look, buddy, I'm your Mom's friend. I'm your friend-"

"You could be our Dad," says Lila.

Nope. Tony nopes out of this conversation – he's already stretching beyond his limits just being an unofficial uncle, _this_ is not happening, not even as a what-if.

"This isn't how it works," Tony protests, voice a little too high, fervently hoping they can't tell he's on the verge of panic. "People marry because they-" _Love each other_? He's not enough of a hypocrite to say this to the kids. "-want to spend their lives together. Sometimes it doesn't work out and they end up disappointed, and maybe need a little help from their friends – but don't confuse the two things. It's different."

"So," Lila grumbles, draping herself over Tony's side, "you don't love Mom?"

"Don't try to extort me, young lady. I love your Mom _like a friend_."

"Like Miss Betty," Lila points out shrewdly.

Fuck, Tony thinks. The Iron Man finally defeated – by a trio of conniving little Hawkasses.

He could admit the thing with Bets is actually…?

Nah.

"That's enough." He tries for strict, but in between Nate's toddlerish adorableness, Lila's Black-Widowesque playing up of her emotional vulnerability, and Cooper's completely genuine broken rage, Tony's melted into a puddle of genius goo. "Let me just be your friend, okay? You've got a Dad-"

"More like a _dead_ beat," snarks Cooper.

"Jay?" Tony pleads.

"To be honest, sir," JARVIS says solemnly, "I am on the children's side in this argument. Making them attend the peace talks would be both artifice and potentially damaging to them."

"Whose idea was it to drag them along anyway?" he asks, grunting when Lila and Coop cooperate to bring him to the floor and pin him down.

Their little brother sits on Tony's chest and _kicks_.

"Cease that, Nathaniel Barton!" Tony demands.

The boy grins and ignores him.

"Uh, Boss?" Friday speaks up. "The itinerary we received already included all four of _our_ Bartons, and it was sent via Secretary-"

"No way," Tony cuts in. "Alright, little people! I'm putting you on a jet with your Mom and a bunch of bodyguards and sending you off for an awesome week on Bali, how's that?"

Nate stops kicking. "Whas' Bali?"

x

Tony stands on the balcony and views the hall that usually doubles as conference centre. It'll work well enough for a mock-trial.

He stares at the rag-tag group of defendants below him, far off at the opposite side of the hall – Rogers, Barnes, Wilson, Barton, Lang, Romanov, Maximov – and realizes that it's the first time ever he doesn't automatically feel defensive in Steve Rogers' presence.

He's not angry anymore. It lets him breathe more easily.

Tony's always considered himself their friend, but he never knew how to be a friend (aside from paying for their _everything_ ). So, maybe he missed that Cap was a mite suicidal. Maybe he missed that for Cap the whole world shrunk and hardened and pinpointed at the first sight of Winter Barnes' face.

Tony wasn't all with it either. He just didn't consider that Cap, so neat and streamlined and the perfect soldier on the outside was in his head basically a long, drawn-out scream for _Bucky_.

Rogers has the weird ability to appear sane despite it. SHIELD collectively didn't notice. Fury didn't notice. Romanov didn't notice – or if she did, she obviously didn't give a fuck. Wilson probably noticed, and tried to help, but got himself caught up in the hunt, trying to make up for 'failing' his own buddy. Rogers and Wilson lined up their matching PTSDs and went skipping, hand in hand, off the deep end.

In hindsight, Tony pities them. He's got regrets. There are things he wishes he did differently. He's not going to apologize, but letting go of the anger – yeah, he can do that. Finally.

He goes back down the dimly lit staircase and emerges in the lobby.

"Tony Stark!" thunders an inimitable voice.

"Thor!" Tony squeaks, being grabbed in a manly embrace with the power of a car crusher. "Good to see you, buddy. Unexpected, what with the long absence and the boycott of my wedding, but good. I've seen Vision flying around, so we're going to have the whole gang together."

Hopefully for the last time, but Tony isn't that much of an optimist.

"You have done admirably in letting go of your grudges, my friend," Thor assures him with the gravitas of a Prince of a realm. "Grace is the most anyone may expect of you on a day like this, and I do not doubt that you shall exceed their expectations."

Tony's kind of touched by this profession.

Someone snorts.

There is a man standing behind Thor and a little to the side. He looks like a cutout from a fashion magazine in his bespoke grey suit, with his slightly overlong dark curls falling into his eyes. Into his poisonous green eyes.

"If _he_ even breathes in the direction of any of _my_ people, I'll tattle on him to Bruce," Tony warns, and means the promise of deicidal retaliation with his entire reactor-free heart.

"Have no worries, my friend," Thor assures him, bowing his head. "We shall both behave honorably on this day."

He doesn't even glance over his shoulder. There's no 'or else' implied. It's just a beatific statement of faith.

Tony doesn't believe for a second that Thor understands his adopted brother enough for that promise to be reliable. He alerts the Fury-bot to a potential hostile, and sends off a text to the _cyber sibs_ , just in case. They'll have the best vantage points to spot anything.

"Go on in," Tony tells Thor, ignoring his shadow. "I'll be along soon. Just need a smoke break."

Thor is savvy enough not point out that Tony doesn't smoke. He goes in, and there are distant sounds of awe and exchanges of greetings. Thor can be heard clearly even through thick walls. He seems to be entertaining the crowd.

Tony amuses himself by imagining all the expressions Loki can't let himself show.

He takes a bathroom break instead of a smoke one, and by the time he comes back Thor has stopped being the centre of attention. That means the crowd is ready for Tony to be the centre of attention. He messages his Number One Conspirator – also known as his wife – and strides in like he owns the place… which he does.

"Hello, gorgeous!" he exclaims on his way from the door to his team. By the time he reaches them nearly every eye in the hall is trained on him. He kisses Betty lightly, already reaching out for Bruce. "Hello, gorgeous!" he says to Bruce and tugs him in for a smooch.

He turns around, and there is Pepper. "Hello, gorgeous!" he greets, because he wants to be fair, and Pepper's pretty like the Nautilus section of the Mandelbrot set. Standing two steps from her is Phil, and at this point Tony can't not.

He presses a quick, friendly kiss to Pep's cheek and turns to Agent Agent. "And hello, gorgeous."

There's sputtering from the peanut gallery. He's expected that, but they're just jealous – for a damn good reason – so it's his absolute delight to announce: "So many people I've slept with in one room!"

"Phil?" someone inquires. The tone of betrayal is so unwarranted that Tony's tempted to go over there and shout some truths into some self-righteous dick's face.

To prevent himself from exploding the peace talks before they've properly started, he saunters over to his favoritest zombie in the world. Phil's no glamorous, ship-launching beauty, but he's one hell of a lovely guy. The thing about him is that his inside is even nicer than the outside, and that happens so rarely with people that Tony absolutely hates seeing the man look away toward the congregating bigwigs just so he wouldn't have to meet anyone's eye.

"Don't be ashamed," Tony bids him, reaching out to put an arm around his shoulders – fantastic shoulders, even though he tries to hide them under the jacket – and kisses his cheek, too. "You enjoyed yourself."

It takes a moment, but it seems to work. Phil lights up just enough to make up for the previous upset. Then he turns to speak to Pepper, but actually address the naysayer from the line of exVengers on the opposite side of the railing. "I'm not. I did."

Pepper sighs, and they share a commiserating look. "I know, right?"

At this point it occurs to Tony that the betrayed tone was probably in reference to Phil having died, when it now turns out that this situation has changed. That is, Tony knows it's changed, whereas Barton – who else, right – would be under the impression that it's been a lie from the start.

Well, Tony decides, serves the asshole right.

As he takes his seat, Tony accidentally meets Rogers' eye. He briefly struggles to keep his face impassive. He blinks. Puts on a faintly confused expression, as if he's looking at someone who seems vaguely familiar, but he just can't place the face.

"I hope you two know what you're doing," Bruce frets, adorable in his predictability.

Bets taps the titanium frame of his wrist-watch with her ring and replies, sweetly: "Just be glad I managed to bribe Tony out of bringing popcorn."


End file.
